re:verb

On today's show, Alex and Calvin – briefly rebranded as Kenneth Jerke and Mikhail Shocktin, co-hosts of "Shock Docs" – explore the state of rhetorical manipulation in the context of the second Trump presidency. We discuss the general ineptitude of the conservative movement occupying the White House and the unsettling lack of a powerful counter-rhetoric in the Democratic opposition, before turning to analyze Trump's tariff policy. We discuss how the tariff conversation is a particularly baffling current example in which raw power seems to be operating without legitimation through traditional rhetorical norms.Applying a Critical Discourse Studies lens to understand this moment, we revisit concepts like dialogicality from Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining how discourse can be evaluated based on whether it opens up difference (ie. to what extent it is dialogical) or suppresses difference. We introduce assumptions analysis from Norman Fairclough, which examines what a writer/speaker takes for granted as truth (existential, propositional, and values assumptions) and assumptions can reduce dialogical space for manipulative purposes. As a case study, we analyze an article by left-punching journalist Batya Ungar Sargon titled "Liberation Day puts Main Street ahead of Wall Street" (published in Commonplace). We analyze the ways that Ungar Sargon's manipulative assumptions reframe Trump's tariffs as beneficial for the American worker by ignoring corporate interests and tax policy, misrepresenting political history, and erasing important debates over national security and border policy issues. We conclude with a reminder that it's always better to be a Mikhail Shocktin than a Kenneth Jerke. Texts Analyzed in this EpisodeBatya Ungar Sargon - “Liberation Day puts main street ahead of Wall Street” (published in Commonplace)Works Referenced in this EpisodeFairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.Relevant Past EpisodesDiscourse and Manipulation, Pt. 3Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 2Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 1re:blurb - Conceptual Metaphorre:blurb - Dialogicalityre:blurb - IdeographsAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)Episode Image Description: Top text: "re:verb"; Left-center image includes a picture of Critical Discourse scholar Norman Fairclough with a laser beam shooting out of his left eye towards right center image; Right-center image is offset, includes a screenshot of an article titled "Liberation Day Puts Main Street Ahead of Wall Street"; Bottom text: "Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day""

Today's episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne's concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man".Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human, unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne's intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne's nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition.Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press.Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York University Press.Johnson, J. (2016). “A man's mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics. Utah State Press.Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts. Univ of California Press.Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research.Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved': An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17.Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. University of Minnesota Press.An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)

Today's episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles's fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly.Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm, such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles's own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles's creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work.Charles Athanasopolous's Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink)Works and Concepts Cited in this EpisodeBurke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press.Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14.Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing'to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge.Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press..An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

On today's show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election. As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats' campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats' seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others. When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue. In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden's and Obama's presidencies and Clinton's losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment's inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.Texts Analyzed in this Episode:Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won't Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”Works & Concepts Cited in this EpisodeFairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347-372.Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke”re:verb episode 71: re:pronounsre:verb episode 14: re:blurb - IdeographsAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

On today's show, we once again fire up our rhetorical stovetop to roast some dubious public argumentation: Oprah Winfrey's recent ABC special, “AI and the Future of Us.” In this re:joinder episode, Alex and Calvin listen through and discuss audio clips from the show featuring a wide array of guests - from corporate leaders like Sam Altman and Bill Gates to technologists like Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, and even FBI Director Christopher Wray - and dismantle some of the mystifying rhetorical hype tropes that they (and Oprah) circulate about the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and other “AI” technologies into our lives. Along the way, we use rhetorical tools from previous episodes, such as the stasis framework, to show which components of the debate around AI are glossed over, and which are given center-stage. We also bring our own sociopolitical and media analysis to the table to help contextualize (and correct) the presenters' claims about the speed of large language model development, the nature of its operation, and the threats - both real and imagined - that this new technological apparatus might present to the world. We conclude with a reflection on the words of novelist Marilynne Robinson, the show's final guest, who prompts us to think about the many ways in which “difficulty is the point” when it comes to human work and developing autonomy. Meanwhile, the slick and tempting narratives promoting “ease” and “efficiency” with AI technology might actually belie a much darker vision of “the future of us.” Join us as we critique and rejoin some of the most common tropes of AI hype, all compacted into one primetime special. In the spirit of automating consumptive labor, we watched it so you don't have to!Works & Concepts cited in this episode:Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?

On today's show, we bring back one of our all-time favorite guests (and emeritus co-Producer / co-Founder of re:verb) Dr. Derek G. Handley to talk about his newly-published book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement. This episode is a spiritual successor to our first episode with Derek (all the way back in Episode 6!), which focused on the rhetoric of 20th-century urban renewal policies in Pittsburgh, and African American citizens' resistance to those policies and practices that threatened their homes and businesses.Derek has now expanded his analysis of urban renewal rhetorics - and the modes of citizenship and resistance practiced by African American community members in response to them. His new book, Struggle for the City, focuses on urban renewal policy struggles that played out across three Northern cities in the 1950s and ‘60s: St. Paul Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In each of these case studies, Derek deftly traces the rhetorical contours of the master narrative (such as the use of the “blight” metaphor) that shaped how urban renewal policies, including highway and infrastructure development, ultimately uprooted and destabilized African American communities. In turn, his case studies center on the voices of these communities, showing how they responded using a framework he calls “Black Rhetorical Citizenship.” The rhetorical practices inherent within this mode of citizenship - which include deliberation and community decision-making, the circulation of multi-modal counterstories, and a forward-looking focus on public memory - are not only essential touchstones in the less-publicized history of Civil Rights struggles in Northern cities during the 20th century; they also provide an important scaffold for current rhetorical strategies in ongoing Black freedom and justice struggles in the US writ large.In this conversation, Derek also shares some details of his ongoing public scholarship project (co-directed with UW-M Geography Professor Dr. Anne Bonds) Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County, which seeks to document restrictive and racist housing covenants in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and its surrounding suburbs, as well as community resistance to these and related practices. Derek's book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement, is available via Penn State University Press on September 24, 2024More information on the Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County project can be found hereWorks and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeHandley, D. G. (2019). “The Line Drawn”: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s-2000s. Rhetoric Review, 38(2), 173-189.Houdek, M., & Phillips, K. R. (2017). Public memory. In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication.Kock, C., & Villadsen, L. (Eds.). (2015). Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation. Penn State Press.Loyd, J. M., & Bonds, A. (2018). Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Sociological Review, 66(4), 898-918.Mapping Prejudice [University of Minnesota Project on restrictive housing covenants]Musolff, A. (2012). Immigrants and parasites: The history of a bio-social metaphor. In Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 249-258). Vienna: Springer Vienna. [on the use of “disease” metaphors in immigration discourse]Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair. Fordham University. [on the concepts of “master narrative” and “counterstories”]Pittsburgh Courier Archive (from Newspapers.com)Wilson, A. (2007). The August Wilson Century Cycle. Theatre Communications Group.An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here

On today's show, Calvin and Alex analyze the rhetoric and politics of the 2024 presidential election in terms of a particularly significant job this cycle: the vice president, or veep! We begin by discussing Vice President Kamala Harris's meteoric rise to the Democratic nomination following President Biden's departure from the race, as well as Harris's conspicuous similarities to HBO's fictional Veep, Selena Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). We then compare and contrast the aesthetics, rhetorical styles, and political stances of Harris's vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Republican veep nominee and Donald Trump's running mate J.D. Vance. Along the way, we discuss how the Democratic Party under Harris and Walz is embracing a rhetoric of normalcy vs. “weirdness” that is genuinely novel and effective as a strategy for delegitimizing GOP policy, and how this approach may help to expand the Democratic voting base in response to state-level crises over reproductive justice and public education. We theorize the Dems' normalizing discourse as a way of forthrightly indexing liberal values and connecting to core American ideographs while also positioning themselves as outsiders fighting a noble cause against entrenched GOP power in state governments and the national judiciary. Nevertheless, we conclude on a cautionary note about the dangers of normalization rhetoric, particularly in a country with an ongoing legacy of structural racism and imperialist foreign policy – including the brutal and unresolved conflict in the Gaza Strip.Textual Artifacts AnalyzedHarris-Meyer comparison text:https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXjWalz artifacts:https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsYVance artifacts:https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.htmlVance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvMVance's TED Talk, “America's Forgotten Working Class”Scholarly Works and Concepts ReferencedKiossev, A. (2008). The oxymoron of normality. Eurozine http://www.eurozine. com/the-oxymoron-of-normality/Pollak, C. (2021). Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU's Online Writing About NSA Surveillance. Written Communication, 38(3), 380-416.van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217856Kairos:https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358Ethos:https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethosAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Have you ever wondered why you immediately gravitate towards some speakers and writers? How they form a connection with you and make you want to pay closer attention? Or why you react with disgust and revulsion to other kinds of communicators? What is it about strategic discourse that fosters and nurtures deep connections with some audiences while (intentionally or unintentionally) turning other kinds of people off right away? On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a wide-ranging discussion of the classical rhetorical concept of ethos, one of the three classical appeals (along with logos and pathos). We begin by overviewing the origins of ethos in ancient Athenian courts of law, recounting debates between Plato and Aristotle about whether ethos is core to the corrupting (or liberating) influence of rhetoric in society. We then explain modern theories such as Kenneth Burke's identification and Michael J. Hyde and Calvin Schrag's notion of ethos as a “dwelling place” shared by speakers and audiences. Ultimately, we argue that the history of ethos theory is defined by attention to how credibility, trust, and persuasion are not accomplished unilaterally or unidirectionally, but rather occur in the dynamic, situated, dialogic interplay between communicators and their audiences. This particular understanding of ethos enlivens our sample analysis, which shows the concept's enduring utility as a critical tool. We introduce and critique the pro-Biden X account @BidensWins, which has been strategically constructing Biden's 2024 re-election campaign ethos. We describe how the posts' recurring language patterns constitute an identity grounded in “win”-quantification and newsworthiness, and how their hyper-patriotism and policy stances seem to be targeting specific voter constituencies for persuasion (while ignoring or disavowing others). We question both the pragmatic wisdom of this ethos strategy and the moral consequences of it for various core Democratic voter blocs that Biden will need in order to defeat Donald Trump. @BidensWins X Posts Analyzed:https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1802423240876331122https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803251566356426859https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803451317098074344https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1778407786302341419https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1797668724008489005https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1798060384487948536https://x.com/POTUS/status/1803176039603957883Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeBaumlin, J.S. (2001) Ethos. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 209-217). Oxford University Press.Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. University of California Press.Hyde, M. J. & C.O. Schrag (Eds.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2), n2.An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

On today's show, Alex and Calvin are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Patricia Fancher, a Continuing Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her fabulous new book Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing, Dr. Fancher offers a groundbreaking history of how the Manchester University Computer and discourses about it were shaped by queerness, embodied gender performativity, and invisibilized gendered labor in the early 1950s. Some of the figures that Fancher's book offers new understandings of include Alan Turing, Christopher Strachey, Audrey Bates, and Cicely Popplewell, with each case study capturing how technical communication and technology development are about more than just usability, efficiency, and innovation. A recurring theme in Dr. Fancher's rhetorical reading of Turing and his colleagues is that there is something queer, performative, and playful about intelligence, and that these dimensions are mostly ignored by the hype around so-called “artificial intelligence” tools like large language models. To explore this theme, we chat about Christopher Strachey's rudimentary love letter generation program, comparing its output to ChatGPT's for similar prompts. We ultimately explore what Turing might have thought of LLMs, and how we can begin to ask queerer questions of our digital tools to produce more interesting and intelligent discourses and technologies. Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeEdenfield, A. C., Holmes, S., & Colton, J. S. (2019). Queering tactical technical communication: DIY HRT. Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), 177-191.Fancher, P. (2024). Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing. NCTE.Fancher, P. (2016). Composing artificial intelligence: Performing Whiteness and masculinity. Present Tense, 6(1).Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277-310.Henrik Oleson exhibition about Turing.Matt Sefton and David Link's web version of Strachey's love letter programRhodes, J., & Alexander, J. (2015). Techne: Queer meditations on writing the self. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.

On today's show, Alex is joined by Olivia Wood, a lecturer in the English Department at City College of New York (CCNY) to discuss the recent escalations of force by the NYPD and campus administrators against student protesters in solidarity with Palestine over the past several weeks. In particular, we touch on the flashpoint raids by police - at the behest of campus administrators - at Columbia and CCNY on Tuesday, April 30th, the rhetorical strategies used by student organizers at the encampments to advocate for their causes of disclosure and divestment, and the problematic discourse that mainstream journalists have been circulating when discussing these movements. We conclude by reflecting on the ways that academic worker collectivities (including but not limited to unions) can help show critical support to student demonstrators exercising free speech on campus and advocating for justice in Palestine.ReferencesRemembering Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)The Killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab‘This machine bonks fascists': US student protester's water jug becomes symbol of resistanceDoctor in Gaza refuses to evacuate, pleads for Israel-Hamas war to stopLinks to some of Olivia's reporting on academic and student organizing in solidarity with Palestine:Faculty, Staff, and Students Must Unite Against Repression of the Palestine Movement (4/23/24)Faculty at University of Texas Austin Strike in Solidarity with Student Protesters (4/25/24)CUNY Students Occupy Campus in Solidarity with Palestine, Building on the University's Legacy of Radical Organizing (4/27/24)CUNY Rank-and-File Workers Stand With the Student Encampment (4/30/24)An accessible transcript for this episode is available upon request - please send us an email at reverbcontent[at]gmail.com or DM us on Twitter / X

On today's show, Calvin and Alex sit down with Dr. Robin Reames - Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago - to discuss her new book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times. In this book, Robin synthesizes rhetorical theories and concepts from Greek antiquity to the 20th century to deliver some of the most practical lessons that rhetorical knowledge can offer. In our conversation, we discuss what it means to be a rhetorical thinker, some of the key characters from ancient Greek rhetorical history who hold important lessons for our current era, and illustrate some examples of how thinking like a rhetorician can help us reason more critically in our day-to-day lives. We conclude with a meditation on how rhetorical knowledge can help us better understand disagreements - from those in our interpersonal relationships to the larger divides that seem to define and constrict our current political reality.Robin Reames's The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself is available now from Basic BooksListen to our episode on Stasis Theory hereAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Spoiler Alert: This episode contains numerous plot spoilers for Civil War.On today's show, we inaugurate a new episode series called reel:verb, in which we rate, review, and analyze a recent movie from the perspective of politics, culture, and language in action. In the first installment, Alex, Olivia, and Calvin tackle the 2024 dystopian thriller Civil War, directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation). Civil War depicts a near-future US torn apart by domestic warfare, as seen from the perspectives of a small group of journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, respectively) who are documenting the fighting and plotting to photograph and interview the besieged US president (Nick Offerman). We begin by providing our individual ratings of the film (out of 5 verbs), and then we recap the major plot points and set pieces that take place along Dunst et. al's roadtrip from hell. We conclude with a wide-ranging analysis of the film's politics and rhetoric, in which we unpack how it depicts journalism (and journalists) and consider its social significance in the midst of ongoing US-backed conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Ultimately, we argue, this film's vision of civil war is too far-fetched, abstracted, and underdeveloped to serve as a true cautionary tale for US audiences – perhaps because Garland, like his cast of photojournalists, is apparently more invested in aestheticizing violence than cogently critiquing it. Works and Concepts Referenced In this EpisodeChouliaraki, L. (2005). Spectacular ethics: on the television footage of the Iraq war. Journal of language and politics, 4(1), 143-159.Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Vintage.Our previous episode with Dr. Roger Stahl on US military cooperation in entertainment productsReuters photographer [Mohammed Salem] wins World Press Photo of the Year with poignant shot from GazaTranscript of Pod Save America episode featuring Alex Garland (interview begins at 38:50)An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.

On today's show, Calvin and Alex sit down with the co-authors of a hot-off-the-presses article in Discourse & Society about journalistic reporting on US drone strikes in the Middle East: Dr. John Oddo (Carnegie Mellon University), Dr. Cameron Mozafari (Cornell University), and Alex Kirsch (MA Professional Writing graduate, CMU). In their article, entitled “Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes,” they examine deictic language - words and phrases that “point” to contextual elements construed as “close” or “far away.” Specifically, they analyze how this type of language is used to make US audiences feel sympathetic or apathetic toward the US drone war and the suffering it caused to ordinary civilians in the 2000s and 2010s.In our conversation, we talk with the authors about how deictic language can position a reader audience as “near” or far” from descriptions of suffering in terms of space, time, veracity, sense perception, emotion, and perspective. They take us through the major findings in their article's comparison between how the Associated Press and The American Prospect used this language - to different extremes - in order to render people suffering from US military violence as immediate, worthy of attention and sympathy, or distant, opaque, and foreign. We also discuss the implications for how this language is used in reporting on other policy issues both foreign and domestic, and the affordances of this model for helping us understand how language in news reporting creates mental images.John, Cameron, and Alex's co-authored article:Oddo, J., Mozafari, C., & Kirsch, A. (2024). Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes. Discourse & Society.Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge University Press.Cap, P. (2008). Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(1), 17-41.Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.————. (2014). Language, space and mind: The conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge University Press.Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. John Wiley & Sons.Kopytowska, M. (2015a). Covering conflict: Between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse, genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(2), 308-339.————. (2015b) Ideology of ‘here' and ‘now': Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3): 347-365.

Do you consider yourself to be a rational person? If so, Scott Adams (a.k.a. “The Dilbert Guy”), has some bad news for you.On today's show, we attempt to surmount our various cognitive dissonances and confirmation biases to better understand “How to See Reality in a More Useful Way,” according to the third chapter of Scott Adams's 2017 pseudo-rhetorical quasi-treatise, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. This chapter takes us headlong into Scott's psychology, charting his journey through various “filters” he developed to help him “predict the future” at various stages in his life: among them, the “Santa Claus filter,” the “Alien Experiment filter,” and most ridiculous of all, his self-proclaimed current “Moist Robot filter.” This one has to be heard to be believed, trust us.Among other topics covered in this chapter are Scott's “two movie” theory of reality, and his assertion that beliefs are really just “mass delusions” that determine how we react to new events and information. As usual, this chapter uncovers yet another layer of Scott's solipsistic nihilism toward the world and its social dynamics. It also contains a whole section on how to become a trained hypnotist. He's a man of many talents, folks.An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Disclaimer: This episode covers sensitive issues related to suicide and self-harm. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, we recommend skipping this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis, in the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor.On the morning of February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force service member, posted a link to his Twitch channel on Facebook, commenting: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.” Several hours later, around 1pm Eastern, Bushnell live-streamed himself walking toward the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. carrying a metal bottle without a lid. Bushnell recorded himself saying: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” After setting up his camera several feet away, still live-streaming, he poured the liquid from his bottle over his head, and lit himself on fire from his feet, shouting “Free Palestine,” over and over, with increasing agony. Bushnell's is the second nationally documented instance of self immolation in response to the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza. In December, a protester - whom the media has refused to name - set themselves on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta while holding a Palestinian flag. How can we best understand these cases: as noble and heroic protests? Or irrational acts of self-harm and self-destruction? To help us think through these questions, we are joined by Dr. James Chase Sanchez, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College and eminent scholar of racism, white supremacy, and social movements. James has published two relevant books: the co-authored collection Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, and Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy, both published in 2021. He also produced the 2018 documentary film Man on Fire, which tells the story of Charles Moore, a 79-year-old minister who self-immolated in protest against racism in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. We discuss Moore's and Bushnell's acts in the context of the history of social movement rhetorics, and consider how to reframe current conversations away from Bushnell the individual and towards issues of collective and internationalist solidarity.You can find more information on James's documentary Man on Fire at this linkJames's 2021 book Salt of the Earth can be purchased at this link

On today's show, Alex and Calvin continue to break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse, recapping part one of this series, demonstrating strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discussing how this kind of large-scale “mind control” is affecting contemporary foreign policy discourse in the US.The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people's thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.This time, to put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding US foreign policy, specifically as it relates to Israel's ongoing war on Gaza: President Joe Biden's November 18 opinion article in the Washington Post, entitled “The U.S. won't back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas.” We closely analyze how President Biden uses manipulation strategies straight out of Van Dijk to persuade WaPo-reading liberals to ignore both the US's constant and substantial material support for Israel's war and its own military's history of bloody and destructive imperialism throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We also note various tactics that the president deploys to naturalize inequality and normalize bigotry, all while touting the US's role as the “essential” peace-loving, freedom-spreading nation. “The U.S. won't back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas” - Joe BidenLink to Part One of this SeriesWorks and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Azoulay, A., & Ophir, A. (2012). The one-state condition: occupation and democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford University Press.Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.Fifield, A. (19 March 2013). “Contractors reap $138B from Iraq war.” CNN.com. McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press.Schneider, T. (8 Oct 2023). “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it's blown up in our faces.” The Times of Israel. Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.

On today's show, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.”The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people's thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel's war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian's email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian EmailWorks and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent@gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.

On today's show, Ben sits down with Dr. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his research at the intersections of border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American and Latinx diasporic media.We begin by discussing Juan's approaches to media studies and challenges in the field, then dive into his new book, Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press). Together, we reflect on the role of media representing border tunnels–underground networks of built and excavated spaces circumventing the above-ground border. As Juan notes, these tunnels are “nearly inaccessible” to the general public, so through their representation, we see media's capacity to give meaning to “spaces and structures in excess of their real referent.” Importantly, Juan shows us how the “figure of the border tunnel” relates to the escalating efforts to violently fortify and police the U.S.-Mexico border. Juan helps us understand the affordances and limitations of border tunnels' depictions in reality television, newscasts, action films, video games, and speculative design projects. We reflect on the role of popular films that appear in the book, such as the Fast and Furious franchise, video games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel, and the reality television series Border Wars in constructing what Juan calls the “racial infrastructures of the border.” This timely conversation helps us rethink our relationship with popular media and culture, drawing out the seemingly invisible role of border tunnels in shaping our understanding of the borderlands. Works referenced in this episodeAgudelo, E. (2008). A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales. Borderwall as Architecture.Fojas, C. (2021). Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures of the US-Mexico Frontier. New York University Press.Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities. New York University Press.Howarth, D. (2016). Beautifying the Border Proposal Replaces US–Mexico Fence with Landscaping. Dezeen. Hernández, K. (2010). Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press. Knight, K. & Llamas-Rodriguez, J. Migrant Steps Project.Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2023). Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground. University of Minnesota Press. Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2017). The Datalogical Drug Mule. Feminist Media Histories, 3 (3), 9-29.Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Border. Lateral, 10 (2).Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2022). Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border. Social Text, 40 (4), 97-123.Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). “The Sewer Transnationalists.” One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play, 2. Mattern, S. (2018). Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures. The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge.Parks, L. (2015). “Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures. Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. The MIT Press.Patterson, C. (2020). Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. New York University Press.An accessible transcript of this episode can be viewed here:https://otter.ai/u/xK1Y3uUOPeEXGBnErGd6_8eszXM

Ever since its announcement in 2021, the Atlanta police training facility project known as “Cop City” has been the subject of much criticism from activists concerned with police violence and environmental justice. The proposal included razing 85 acres of forest in DeKalb County, Georgia (just South of the city of Atlanta) to build, among other things, a mock “city” in which police would conduct training exercises. In response, members of the surrounding community and beyond have engaged in swift, voluminous, and continuous protest.But in September 2023, in a severe escalation against the protest movement, Georgia Attorney General Michael Carr indicted 61 protestors under the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. Given that this act has historically been used to charge members of organized criminal syndicates (and of recent note, Donald Trump and his campaign staff for seeking to overturn the state-level presidential election results), its use to indict political protesters as part of a criminal conspiracy is a worrisome landmark in Georgia's prosecutorial history. More broadly, it represents a critical abrogation of speech and association freedoms, and it sets a terrifying precedent for the suppression of political movements.On today's show, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie dive into the actual language of the 109-page indictment document to analyze its rhetorical conflation of political protest and free association with a “criminal conspiracy.” In addition to critiquing the document's numerous typographical errors and sloppy, imprecise prose, we assess how its language of threat-construction renders advocates of racial and environmental justice “violent anarchists,” whose expressions and practices of “mutual aid” and “solidarity” allegedly constitute illegal associations in a broader “conspiracy.” We also discuss the dark implications of this case for free speech and free association, the chilling effects the indictment could have on political movements nationwide, and some of its particular significance for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and technical communication.You can read the full indictment document against the Defend the Atlanta Forest organizers here:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictmentYou can donate to the Legal Defense Fund for Stop Cop City organizers here:https://secure.actblue.com/donate/atllegalfundFor a full list of mutual aid funds, including payments to individual defendants, see the following LinkTree:https://linktr.ee/weelauneearresteefundraisers

Are you a writing instructor or student who's prepared to turn over all present and future communication practices to the magic of ChatGPT? Not so fast! On today's show, we are joined by Dr. Emily M. Bender, Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and a pre-eminent academic critic of so-called “generative AI” technologies. Dr. Bender's expertise involves not only how these technologies work computationally, but also how language is used in popular media to hype, normalize, and even obfuscate AI and its potential to affect our lives.Dr. Bender's most well-known scholarly work related to this topic is a co-authored conference paper from 2021 entitled, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” In our conversation, Emily explains why she and her co-authors chose the “stochastic parrot” metaphor – how this helps us to understand large language models and other related technologies more accurately than many competing metaphors. We go on to discuss several actual high-stakes, significant issues related to these technologies, before Dr. Bender provides a helpful index of some the most troublesome ways they are talked about in the media: synthetic text “gotcha”s, infancy metaphors, linear models of progress, inevitability framings, and many other troublesome tropes. We conclude with a close reading of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about using synthetic text generators in writing classrooms: “Why I'm Excited About Chat GPT” by Jenny Young. Young's article exemplifies many of the tropes Emily discussed earlier, as well as capturing lots of strange prevailing ideas about writing pedagogy, genre, and rhetoric in general. We hope that you enjoy this podcast tour through the world of AI hype media, and we ask that you please remain non-synthetic ‘til next time – no shade to parrots!

On today's episode, we're thrilled to be joined once again by friend-of-the-show Dr. Jim Brown, Jr., Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. While Jim is mainly known to us as an expert in digital rhetorical studies, today we speak to him about his experience as outgoing president of the Camden chapter of Rutgers' faculty union, the AAUP-AFT, amid its recent historic labor strike and contract negotiations. The Rutgers faculty strike was a massive success, earning pay increases and structural bargaining changes that will redound not only to the benefit of Rutgers' precarious faculty but also to colleagues at peer institutions–including, perhaps, at your own university, listener!In a wide-ranging conversation, Calvin picks Jim's brain about the general duties of serving as a union chapter president, the events leading up to the April strike (including the university president's threat of a legal injunction), the details of the union's victories, the broader issue of neoliberalism in academic labor, and the challenges of forging solidarity across so many different job categories (e.g. tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track teaching faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate faculty, and graduate researchers–all across many different disciplines). Finally, Jim explains how he applied his rhetorical training to the strike and negotiations, and how the strike and negotiations continue to influence his digital rhetoric research. Works and Concepts Referenced in this episode:Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.Chronicle of Higher Ed: Rutgers' President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back.DuFord, R. (2022). Solidarity in conflict: A democratic theory. Stanford University Press.Eric Blanc on Twitter: Rutgers workers sing “Hey Holloway”Murch, D. J. (2010). Living for the city: Migration, education, and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. UNC Press Books.NBC News: Rutgers University reaches deal with faculty unions to end historic strikeThe Progressive: The Rutgers Strike is a Turning Point for Higher EdRutgers Office of the President: Regarding the Faculty Unions' StrikeRutgers historian Dr. Donna Murch on Democracy Now!State of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy's Office: Governor Murphy Announces Framework Agreement Between Rutgers University Administration and Labor Union RepresentativesAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Otter.ai)

The cognitive scientists at re:verb couldn't get enough of Win Bigly, Scott Adams' bizarre treatise on persuasion in a supposedly post-fact era. After tackling the introduction in December (listen to the first installment here!), we bring you our reading and re:joinder critique the first full chapter, which discusses why ordinary people like us fail to grasp reality for what it is: a mere plaything of the mastermind behind Dilbert. From Adams' ramblings, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie unearth top-secret persuasion techniques, such as lying, making speling errors, and incorrectly citing facts.Disclaimer: These techniques are not proven to convince anyone of anything, only to garner attention and “distort reality.” And according to Adams, manipulations of “reality” and “truth” should not be used by we ordinary folk - only Master Persuaders™ like Trump can handle their raw power. In this episode, we tackle the big question at the heart of this chapter: is it ethical to intentionally mislead an audience while trying to persuade them? Since our December episode, Dilbert is no longer in print in any newspaper after Scott Adams referred to Black people as a "hate group" on his "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" livestream. He now posts "Dilbert Reborn" comics on Locals, a right-wing subscription site, where Dogbert et al can wax cynical on "wokeness" to their hearts' content.Join Calvin, Alex, and Sophie in their Chipmunks-inspired squeakquel to Win Bigly, because a mere sequel wouldn't do it justice.An accessible transcript of this episode can be accessed here

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Fearing an explosion, emergency crews conducted a controlled burn of several of the cars, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and forcing the evacuation of local residents. In the ensuing weeks, pictures and videos were shared across social media of dead fish in local waterways and other sick animals throughout the region, followed by official reports of soil, air, and water contamination posing health risks to wildlife and human beings. In spite of conflicting safety information coming from the EPA, Norfolk Southern, and other government officials, residents have continued to express concerns over the long-term environmental and health consequences for Eastern Ohio.On today's show, we explore the perspectives of East Palestine residents with our co-host, co-producer (and reporter!) Sophie Wodzak, who traveled to the area and interviewed local residents in the aftermath of the derailment. Her co-authored article in the New York Times explores conflicts between East Palestine residents and the local, state, and federal officials who shaped its mainstream media narrative in the wake of the disaster.Joining us in this conversation is Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, whose research focuses on the ways that rural communities organize to self-advocate on issues of environmental justice. Together, we explore the importance of legitimizing the local residents' situated knowledge - a type of knowledge grounded in a person's direct experience of an issue's consequences - in environmental policy conversations and media framing.Sophie's co-authored article in the New York Times: “Federal Officials Send Help After Ohio Derailment, but Residents' Frustrations Persist”Dr. Erin Brock Carlson's relevant research on situated knowledge and environmental organizing:Carlson, E. B., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Legitimizing situated knowledge in rural communities through storytelling around gas pipelines and environmental risk. Technical Communication, 68(4), 40-55.Caretta, M. A., & Carlson, E. B. (2023). Coercion via eminent domain and legal fees: The acceptance of gas extraction in West Virginia. Environmental Justice, 16(1), 36-42.Carlson, E. B., & Gouge, C. (2021). Rural health and contextualizing data. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 41-49.An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Trigger warning: if you are offended by evidence-based arguments against moral panics surrounding higher education, listen with discretion!Light kidding aside, this episode addresses a very serious issue: restrictions on free speech in higher education. And no, we're not talking about the exaggerated culture war invocations: “angry mobs” of “coddled students” yelling about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to shut down speakers they don't like. Rather, we're talking about real, top-down legislative attempts to restrict free speech on college campuses, such as Florida's HB 999 bill – and the long-running rhetorical strategies and tropes that have reappeared in the language of anti-speech laws like Florida's. On today's show, Alex speaks with Dr. Brad Vivian, Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences, and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University, about his new book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. We work to rhetorically dissect some of the most common campus culture war tropes that developed over the 2010s, such as the rallying cries for increased “viewpoint diversity” (read: more speakers with bigoted, discredited, or easily discreditable viewpoints), the pseudoscientific myth of the “coddled” student popularized by writers such as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt, and the incessant fear-mongering over the so-called “indoctrination campaign” of Critical Race Theory. In examining the rhetorical history of these tropes, we chart their strange evolution from somewhat disingenuous calls for “more speech” in higher education spaces to our current moment: in which 44 states (so far) have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of a number of subjects ranging from Gender Studies to “Critical Theory.”Why have these ostensibly pro-free speech arguments redounded to authoritarian attempts to crack down on academic freedom, and how might speech restrictions in US higher education serve as a kind of “trial balloon” for further governmental restrictions in the broader public sphere? As we grapple with these questions, we consider how colleges and universities might recommit to a more just and genuine vision of intellectual freedom.Dr. Brad Vivian's book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education is available now from Oxford University PressDraft text of Florida's HB 999

Was your favorite film approved by Uncle Sam? And just how much of your streaming watchlist did the CIA curate? On today's episode, Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Roger Stahl, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, to discuss the widespread problem of US information operations in the motion picture industry–including, most recently, the 2022 box office smash Top Gun: Maverick. Thanks to Roger's research team on his recent documentary Theaters of War (2022), we now know much more about the curious scripting and production relationships between entertainment studios and the US security state than we did until very recently. Their work has uncovered thousands of screen properties whose content was directly altered to serve US propaganda goals – as well as many hundreds of shows and movies that never saw the light of day due to lack of official support. So, with Roger's help, we analyze the recent history of major military- and intelligence-approved cinema and TV hits, working our way backwards from Maverick to the original Top Gun (1986), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Rules of Engagement (2000), and even – huh??? – the comedy Meet the Parents (2000), among others. We also discuss the recent Amazon streaming success Jack Ryan (2018-present) and how its second season manufactured consent in real time for US coup-mongering in Venezuela. As we work through these examples, we also consider the overarching rhetorical ideologies in the military documents Roger's research team has been studying: from the military's curious appeals to the value of “accuracy” to patterns in types of content they deem to be “showstoppers” (leading to withdrawal of official support). We also ask whether this gigantic domestic influence operation can be properly termed “information warfare,” and what kinds of policy changes are needed to address it. For example, should there be a disclaimer included with trailers and posters for movies co-produced by the US military? Or, more radically, should these aspects of military policy be simply abolished? We hope you enjoy our deep-dive into an extremely fascinating and timely topic with a rhetorical studies expert doing valuable investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. If you have a Kanopy subscription, check out Roger Stahl's 2022 documentary Theaters of War to learn much, much more. Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeJenkins, T. (2016). The CIA in Hollywood: How the agency shapes film and television. University of Texas Press.Tom Secker's investigative journalism website Spy Culture.Stahl, R. (2022, May 30). Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun'?. LA Times. Stahl, R. (2009). Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. Routledge.Stahl, R. (2022). Theaters of War. Media Education Foundation. Available on Kanopy. Stahl, R. (2018). Through the crosshairs: War, visual culture, and the weaponized gaze. Rutgers University Press.Stahl, R. (2016). Weaponizing speech. Quarterly journal of speech, 102(4), 376-395.

Are you winning bigly? No? Neither is Scott Adams, the infamous cartoonist, blogger, and self-proclaimed “expert predictor”, whose formerly ubiquitous comic strip Dilbert was recently pulled from national syndication. In September, Dilbert featured “anti-woke” content caricaturing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the corporate world, and it was promptly “cancelled” by Lee Enterprises, owner of about 100 newspapers that had formerly carried the strip. Nevertheless, back in 2017, Adams claimed to be an expert on the subject of winning–as well as communication and “political reality”–in his book / political manifesto Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. Adams famously predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election, and he grounds most of the book's arguments in the ostensible ethos he has garnered from this single successful prediction.Win Bigly is the subject of our latest re:joinder episode, in which Alex reads some of its most head-scratching passages for Sophie and Calvin, and all three co-hosts learn far less than they expected to about what makes Donald Trump a “master persuader.” We do our best to make sense of Adams' arguments before picking apart their most spurious assumptions: Adams' questionable narrative of the 2016 election, his bizarre heuristic / coding scheme for “persuaders” (from “weapons-grade”, to “cognitive scientist”, down to “commercial grade”... ?), as well as his overall epistemology and ethics, featuring the claims that Trump's victory “blew a hole in the fabric of reality,” and that this is a good thing -- not politically, but because it proved Scott Adams right. All told, Adams draws on his questionable credentials as a business person, communication expert, and philosopher to provide one of the most bizarre analyses of Donald Trump's rhetoric ever written. This is (probably) part one in a series, since we were only able to get through the introduction. Please join us for future installments! As cognitive scientists – rather than weapons-grade persuaders – we need all the support we can get.Works and Concepts ReferencedBeasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 13(1), 7-35.Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1-14.Our re:blurb ep on rhetorical situation. Hume, D. (2003). A treatise of human nature. Courier Corporation.Hume, D. (2016). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy (pp. 191-284). Routledge.Tulis, J. K. (1987). The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton University Press.Our re:blurb episode on Dialogicality (featuring Clint Eastwood's “Empty Chair Obama” speech)

“A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat,” proclaims Slate. The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, rhetorically: “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” And the New York Times warns: “A.I. is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” Judging by media coverage of A.I. writing algorithms, you would think they're on the verge of becoming the easiest and most effective cheating option for writing students. But is the situation really that simple? To help us answer this question, we're joined on the show this week by Dr. S. Scott Graham, associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Scott uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to study communication in bioscience and health policy, with special attention to bioethics, conflicts of interest, and health AI. Most recently, he published an Inside Higher Ed piece about A.I. and college student writing entitled “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About.” In our wide-ranging conversation, Scott explains why he describes himself as a “A.I. cautiously optimistic” despite the many well-documented problems with A.I. in areas such as policing and healthcare. He also helps us understand the limits of A.I. as a cheating tool as well as its affordances for teaching genre in college writing. We go on to discuss some potentially concerning non-academic applications of algorithmic writing, before concluding that (as with A.I. policing and healthcare), the problems we might attribute to A.I. tend to be better understood as problems endemic to our structurally unequal society. Scott also points out that writing algorithms are certain to create conflicts between different people's (and disciplines') ideas about language and “authentic” subjectivity, and that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in helping people outside our discipline understand why we tend to express skepticism at notions of “authenticity” in writing.Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:Scott's great article in Inside Higher Ed: “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About”Graham, S. S. (2015). The politics of pain medicine. In The Politics of Pain Medicine. University of Chicago Press.Graham, S. S. (2020). Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. The Ohio State University Press.Graham, S. S. (2022). The Doctor and the Algorithm: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Health AI.

For this year's Halloween special, we wanted to take a journey through the filmography of one of our favorite film directors, Jordan Peele. From the breakout success of his 2017 thriller Get Out, to 2019's creepy and horrifying tour-de-force Us, to this year's action-packed monster movie Nope, Jordan Peele is becoming arguably one of the most important American directors working today. His films not only bend and play with the ostensible genre conventions he works within, they also deliver substantial, semiotically rich critiques of racial politics, class struggle, and media in American society and culture. Not to mention, his films are just immensely entertaining - equal parts deeply cerebral, outrageously funny, and heart-stoppingly terrifying.To help us discuss this topic, we're very excited to be joined by Dr. andré m. carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.We use concepts from Dr. carrington's (and other scholars') work to discuss all three of Peele's films, charting the salience of “paraspaces” and “Otherhoods” in each as spaces where speculative imaginaries of trauma and alterity can become bone-chillingly real (such as “the sunken place” in Get Out, or the subterranean tunnel dwellings of the tethered in Us). In addition, we cover the various ways Peele incorporates “fanservice” into his films, tipping a cap to fans of horror and sci-fi and providing moments of cathartic release amidst the deluge of dread, and playing with the various conventions of speculative fiction genres to create unique and cerebral insights against a tableau of terror.Follow Dr. andré m. carrington on Twitter, find links to more of his work on his UC-Riverside faculty profile, and check out his book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction.Be sure to follow UC-Riverside's Mellon Sawyer Seminar (which Dr. carrington is participating in this year), entitled “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.”Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Dash, J., & Baker, H. A. (1992). Not without my daughters. Transition, (57), 150-166.Delany, S. R. (2012). Shorter views: Queer thoughts & the politics of the paraliterary. Wesleyan University Press.Tananarive Due's course on The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black HorrorGordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. U of Minnesota Press.Lavender, I. (2011). Race in American science fiction. Indiana University Press.

We at re:verb can neither confirm nor deny whether the truth will set you free - but it certainly provides good fodder for rhetorical criticism! On today's show, Alex and Calvin present a re:joinder episode with a unique rhetorical artifact: an “unclassified” podcast recently released by one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).The first episode of The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast features hosts “Dee” and “Walter” interviewing current CIA Director Bill Burns about the history and current state of the agency, in their own words. But, of course, there's more to it than that! We examine this podcast as a rhetorical genre with a specific social action in mind: gaining the assent and trust of the center-left-aligned American public, and recruiting educated liberals to work for the agency.From their straight-out-of-true-crime theme music to the hosts' vocal performances echoing the likes of Sarah Koenig and Roman Mars, we note the eerie formal parallels between The Langley Files and some of the most popular informative/investigative podcasts currently running. In addition, we talk about some of the new (and some old) propaganda tropes that the CIA uses to describe its work, from its essentially “apolitical” function, “working in secrecy to protect the American people”, “organizing assets to do hard work in hard places,” all the way to the now-vaunted “competition” amongst “great powers” (a.k.a. the U.S. and China). We also critique and contexualize the strange virtue-signaling at play in how the CIA describes two of its recent “successes”: their prediction that Russia was going to invade Ukraine earlier this year, and their targeted assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.What emerges from our analysis is a clearer picture of why the CIA might produce a podcast like this. For one, they outline a need to recuperate the agency's image in the face of what they call “a short supply” of “trust in institutions” from the American public. But more troublingly, we theorize that this podcast is designed as an avenue for humanizing the labor of the people who work in the agency, and as a way of recruiting educated liberals who face slim job prospects and harbor revulsion for the reactionary, anti-“deep state” American right-wing.Works and Concepts Cited in this EpisodeCIA's own journal on what the Intelligence Community means by "customers""Humans of CIA" Recruiting VideoItalian journalist Stefania Maurizi's thread on the US role in propping up recently elected far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia MeloniLee, M. A. (2001, 1 May). The CIA's worst-kept secret: Newly declassified files confirm United States collaboration with nazis. Foreign Policy in Focus.Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(2), 144-173.New Yorker report on CIA's targeting of military-age males in Pakistan for drone strikes.Rosenberg, C. (2019). What the CIA's torture program looked like to the tortured. The New York Times.Weiner, T. (2008). Legacy of ashes: The history of the CIA. Anchor.Wikipedia article for “Limited Hangout”An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

What's a tenant union, and why does it matter? On today's show, Alex and Calvin get some fascinating answers to this question from Luke Melonakos-Harrison, a Masters student in Yale University's Divinity School, tenant union organizer with the Connecticut Tenants Union and the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, and aspiring Methodist pastor. In the course of our conversation, we learn about the kinds of unresolved housing issues, often exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, that led Luke and other tenants to begin organizing. We discuss these issues' intersectional dimensions: how they most severely affect individuals marginalized by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status, as well as how housing issues intersect with other political problems such as the prison-industrial complex and gender-based violence and discrimination. A crucial concept Luke introduces to us is “the cult of property values,” which captures how landlords, real estate developers, and dominant media and political classes attach almost religious significance to the value of property, while neglecting other, competing sets of values like human rights and economic justice. Along with these stinging critiques, Luke shares some amazing gains that he and his fellow organizers have been able to make at a local policy level in Connecticut, and explains some of their inside-outside strategies in response to the quirks of state law. We close by seeking Luke's tips for anyone listening who may be interested in forming a tenant union of their own. Luke's main suggestion is rather simple, but inspiring: get to know your neighbors! It's a welcome reminder – and the whole conversation is a bit of a salve – in a time when it's quite easy to surrender to alienation and despair. We hope you enjoy it!Follow Luke, the CT Tenants Union, and Connecticut DSA on Twitter:https://twitter.com/l_melo_hhttps://twitter.com/cttenantsunionhttps://twitter.com/centralctdsaNews coverage of recent tenant organizing efforts in Connecticut:https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/tenants_union_bill_heads_to_full_board_of_aldershttps://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/Mayor-No-excuse-for-conditions-at-17361141.phphttps://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/A-week-after-hearing-cries-for-help-from-17370301.phphttps://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/quinnipiac_gardens_tenant_union_https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-30/new-haven-could-be-among-the-first-in-ct-to-recognize-tenant-unions-under-local-law

At the recent 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), right-wing movement leaders couldn't stop whining about “pronouns.” For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that his preferred pronouns are “kiss my ass,” and former Trump official Matt Schlapp complained that instead of carrying out his “duties” like dealing with the “open border,” President Biden is “talking about pronouns.” However, 2022 was not the first CPAC in which this particular part of speech caught heat; back in 2019, Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin began her remarks, “my pronouns are ‘U-S-A'!”Why do some conservatives attack and mock “pronouns”, and what exactly do they mean when they use the term? As our entry in the Big Rhetorical 2022 Podcast Carnival on “Spaces and Place In and Beyond the Academy”, this episode unpacks the history and politics of gendered personal pronouns such as “he” and “she,” genderless and non-binary pronouns (e.g. “they”), and various discourse practices in academic and activist circles that relate to personal pronoun usage. After analyzing some recent and relevant policy documents, Alex and Calvin explain the epistemic and ideological bases for “pronouns” as a negative ideograph–a one-word slogan encapsulating everything scary and “un-American” about the increasing tolerance of LGBTQ+ people in public life. “Pronouns,” we find, doesn't only index a debate over present-day gender expression; it also draws from the legacies of settler-colonialism and hyper-nationalism, which have always co-constituted hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality in US society. However, we also note the ironic fact that strict use of gendered pronouns such as “he” and “she,” especially to refer to a generic person or non-human objects and entities, is historically recent and linguistically arbitrary.We conclude by shifting from history and theory to a question of action: what is the pragmatic case for putting your preferred pronouns in your social media bios and email signature lines, and giving students the opportunity to “share your name and pronouns” in classroom introductions? How do these practices make everyday learning and social action more feasible and manageable? We break down some practical benefits for teaching, political organizing, and ordinary personal interaction.Overall, we hope this episode helps demystify and defang the issue of “pronouns”, which are really not as confusing or threatening as some make them out to be. From Connecticut to Utah, in academia and beyond, we all use them, and they haven't caused the sky to fall (so far!).Works and Concepts ReferencedAllen, J. M., & Faigley, L. (1995). Discursive strategies for social change: An alternative rhetoric of argument. Rhetoric Review, 14(1), 142-172.Baron, D. (2018). A brief history of singular ‘they.' Oxford English Dictionary blog. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.Conrod, K. (2018). Pronouns and gender in language. In K. Hall & R. Barrett (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford UP.Hinchy, J. (2019). Governing gender and sexuality in colonial India: the Hijra, c. 1850–1900. Cambridge University Press.McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.Miranda, D. A. (2010). Extermination of the joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1-2), 253-284.Swyers, H., & Thomas, E. (2018). Murderbot pronouns: A snapshot of changing gender conventions in the United States. Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 3(3), 271-298.“Wisconsin District Bans Pride Flags From Classrooms, Pronouns in Emails” - Education WeekTennessee bill on pronounsBiden-Harris Executive Order that mentions pronouns twiceTranscript of this episode's audio from Otter.ai

On June 28, 2022, explosive public testimony was delivered by a former Trump Administration aide named Cassidy Hutchinson in front of the United States House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attacks. Hutchinson's testimony corroborated and deepened the Committee's case that President Trump had led the attacks. In addition, Hutchinson divulged an extraordinary anecdote in which, after learning that his attorney general, William Barr, had refused to back Trump's claims of election fraud, Trump purportedly slammed a plate against a wall; according to Hutchinson, the wall was dripping with ketchup. The 45th president himself seems to have been watching Hutchinson's testimony in real-time, because immediately after it aired, he dashed off a flurry of enraged posts on an obscure social media site, Truth Social, which he founded in late 2021 after Twitter and Facebook banned his accounts following January 6th. Trump's comments about Hutchinson quickly circulated on the more popular and mainstream social media platforms, but their users could not directly interact with Trump's incendiary content unless they also had accounts on the strangely named (and uncannily designed) Truth Social. On this episode, Calvin and Alex dig into Truth Social in real-time–so you don't have to. What is it? How does it work? Which accounts (other than Trump's) are most popular there? How does its glossary define “Truth”? Is all of the content shared on TS overtly right-wing propaganda, or is there more benign stuff as well? (And if there is, what does it look like?) We answer all of these questions and more, in addition to providing context about Trump's recent legal maneuvering in relation to the site, as well as complaints from some of its users that censorship and “shadow banning” are just as much problems there as on Facebook and Twitter. We close by breaking down the strange philosophical notions of “truth” promulgated both within the conservative movement and in more liberal approaches to “fact-checking”, and we argue that for all of its flaws, at least in its terminology Twitter doesn't claim to be offering anything other than what it is: a collection of random bird sounds that may or may not mean anything. Works and Concepts ReferencedBrown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.Burke, K. (1966). Chapter Three—Terministic Screens. Language as symbolic action. University of California Press.Ellul, J., Merton, R. K., Kellen, K., & Lerner, J. (1973). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes. New York: Vintage books. [Introduces concept of horizontal propaganda.]Gruwell, L. (2018). Constructing research, constructing the platform: Algorithms and the rhetoricity of social media research. Present Tense, 6(3), 1-9.Trump left social media company board before federal subpoenas, filing shows–CNBCTrump Throws New Tantrum After Former Aide Exposes Jan. 6 Tantrum–Rolling StoneTruth Social Users Are Fuming Over “Censorship” on Trump's Platform–The Daily Beast

In the wake of shooting massacres in Uvalde, TX and Buffalo, NY, public outcry has been sustained and vociferous, recalling similarly intense reactions to previous mass shootings over the past 10 years. But in the US, public policy responses to such events are rarely as swift or sweeping as most of us would prefer. Just two days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, in which 19 children between the ages of 9 and 11 were shot and killed in their classroom, the US Senate recessed for its annual Memorial Day holiday, delaying any possibility of legislative action to address mass shootings by nearly two weeks. Yet, while the Senate's flaws as a democratic institution have received lots of attention from scholars, journalists, and activists, less often critiqued in terms of public accountability for resolving ongoing crises is the office of the presidency. On today's show, we attempt to fill this gap by examining President Biden's public statements about the massacres in Uvalde and Buffalo, the impending Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Across these issues, we've noticed a common discursive trope that demands closer scrutiny, which we've dubbed, "we're all trying to find the guy who can do something about this!" In President Biden's rhetorical style, this strategy connects to his cultivated identity as “Eulogizer-in-Chief.” Under our Eulogizer-in-Chief, we are constantly reminded of how sad and unjust ongoing events are, and we are often told how much these events "are not who we are as Americans", but we are rarely if ever informed about what our MOTUS (Mourner of the United States) plans to do about them. In terms of classical speech genres, epideictic (ceremonial) rhetoric has crowded out deliberative (policy) and forensic (legal) rhetoric. The result is a public discourse of despair, in which the only actions that leaders frame as feasible are individual citizen actions -- "vote harder!" or "organize harder!" -- rather than concrete government plans and policies. Politics becomes increasingly marketized and commodified, with engagement by grassroots activists compared in terms of pure numerical value to that of astroturfed corporate lobbying efforts, and the "winner" of such contests (invariably the side with more money) granted the executive or legislative action of their choice. Leaders, for their parts, dispassionately analyze these market dynamics in their public messaging, creating a feedback loop of demobilization that comes to affect even their own perceptions of their power to act. However, we hasten to point out, many significant executive actions have been taken over the past 20+ years to combat terrorism and other security threats, often without formal approval of the other branches of government. This suggests that Biden has the capacity to do much more than he is currently doing. Overall, we argue that it is crucial to demand something other than hollow words of grief and virtue-signaling tweets from the most powerful people in the world.Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeBeasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 13(1), 7-35.Blanchfield, P. (2018). The market can't solve a massacre. Splinter News. NBC News - Alex Seitz-Wald & Mike Memoli: “‘Grief must be witnessed': Joe Biden's first 100 days as consoler-in-chief” (28 April, 2021)NYT - Katie Glueck & Matt Flegenheimer: “Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief” (11 June 2020)Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity. Univ. Press of Mississippi.Rood, C. (2018). “Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control. Quarterly journal of speech, 104(1), 47-70.Too, Y. L. (2001). Epideictic genre. Encyclopedia of rhetoric, 251-57.See also the Wikipedia entry for epideictic. WaPo - Jennifer Rubin: “With Joe Biden, we finally have a mourner in chief again” (23 Feb 2021)Zarefsky, D. (2004). Presidential rhetoric and the power of definition. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34(3), 607-619.Speech w/ Biden defining Buffalo shooting as “domestic terrorism” https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1527064065314627584?s=20&t=ehy5LY4DwBd_zfF_sfHYXQSpeech w/ Biden calling Buffalo shooting a “racially motivated act of white supremacy”:https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1525946642519793666

This episode was produced as a virtual panel presentation for the 2022 Computers and Writing Conference. It has been 2 years in the making, and we're so pleased to finally present it to you!Academics have been increasingly using podcasts as rhetorically rich tools for achieving pedagogical goals and re-theorizing the power and potential of sonic rhetorics. While academic podcasts can serve as a useful medium for scholarly conversations among insiders, less explored has been the potential for such podcasts to accommodate critical knowledge practices and disciplinary concepts for broader audiences. Our podcast, re:verb, attempts to bridge the divide between intellectual knowledge and activist practice, showcase movements and causes, and discuss activist practice through rhetorical lenses. Through these discussions, we attempt to synthesize knowledges inside and outside the academy, and demystify activism by rhetorically analyzing the thought processes that go into planning and executing it.For this panel presentation and special episode of re:verb, three of our co-producers - Calvin Pollak, Alex Helberg, and Sophie Wodzak - reached out to individuals working on social justice projects in our own local communities. Alex presents his conversation with Dani Singerman, a food justice advocate in Hartford, CT, who has been working on a project to mobilize resources for constructing a grocery store in the North End neighborhood of the city. Sophie Wodzak reconnects with previous guest and friend of the show Crystal Grabowski, who has been advocating for reproductive justice and abortion access in Western Pennsylvania for years. And finally, Calvin Pollak shares a conversation with his colleague Avery Edenfield, a faculty member in the English Department at Utah State University, about his work advocating for LGBTQ+ issues in a variety of different contexts. For the “Q&A” portion of our panel, the three co-producers reconvene to discuss our major take-aways from our conversations, and reflect on the rhetorical dimensions of contemporary activist practice, including: how to break down a “big” issue into smaller, more actionable “chunks”; the need to account for the “slow” work of activism, and how seemingly small actions it can still have a massive impact on others' well-being; and finally, the importance of ethical collaborations between scholars and activists, celebrating the different situated expertise(s) that everyone can bring to the table.

We would prefer not to write a description for this episode… but here's one anyway!Today's episode is a re:vival of our re:read series, where we create dramatic interpretive readings of short fiction with contemporary political and cultural relevance. In this installment, inspired by our recent conversation with Dr. Kendall Phillips on “rhetorics of refusal,” Calvin, Ben, and Alex bring to life the classic Herman Melville story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” originally published in Putnam's Monthly magazine in 1853. This story documents the tribulations of a Wall Street lawyer who hires a morose figure named Bartleby to work for him as a scrivener. Bartleby quickly turns from an industrious copy-writer to a passively resisting automaton, whose only response to any request is simply: “I would prefer not to.” As the fallout from Bartleby's absurdly principled behavior continues to unfold, the narrator finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about social life, language, and labor.Join our crew of voice actors - Calvin as the narrator, Ben taking the role of the eponymous Bartleby, and Alex playing various minor characters - as we traverse this darkly comic tale of 19th-century alienation and absurdism, scored with period-specific music to accentuate the drama. Our dramatic reading is followed by a reflection on some of the story's themes and implications: the literary works and political actors that “Bartleby” presaged, its critique of alienated (and alienating) labor, the co-optation of refusal rhetorics under neoliberal capitalism, and the affordances of individual vs. collective resistance in social and political movements.Accessible transcript of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” from Project Gutenberg:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11231/11231-h/11231-h.htmMusic featured in this episode

On today's show, Ben and Alex have the privilege to dish with Dr. Anita Mannur, Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Miami University, about her research on the intersections that food has with culture, race, and gender.We begin the conversation by reflecting on how discourses around food and consumption practices, especially in postcolonial contexts, reflect our ideas of national identity and “authenticity” - for instance, the debate over whether Chicken Tikka Masala is an “authentic” Indian dish, despite its origins as an accommodation of traditional Indian cuisine to Anglo-European sensibilities. As Anita notes in her work, cultural conversations around food, and reactions to those foods' smells, tastes, and appearance are often tied to various social identities that we carry in other aspects of our lives, and can tell us a great deal about what happens as we negotiate those identities through various sensory experiences.Throughout our discussion, we trace the transformative (often homosocial and even queer) practices that emerge in intimate spaces of food production like the kitchen - exchanging knowledge, gossip, and other affective sensations. We also examine some sites that constitute of what Anita calls “intimate eating publics,” such as the now-defunct Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh, PA (RIP). Between talking about Anita's analyses of some of these eating publics from her new book Intimate Eating (such as The Great British Baking Show), we share intimate stories from our own culinary lives, and make a few delicious food puns along the way. It's a delightful conversation that we hope you'll find comestible and digestible!Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeKu, R.J-S., Manalansan, M.F., Mannur, A. (Eds.). (2013). Eating Asian America: A food studies reader. New York University Press.Mannur, A. (2009). Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Temple University Press.Mannur, A. (2017). Un-homing Asian American studies: Refusals and the politics of commitment. In Schlund-Vials, C. (Ed.), Flashpoints for Asian American studies (pp. 82-98). Fordham University Press.Mannur, A. (2022). Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. Duke University Press.Trinh, L., Wong, K.S., Schlund-Vials, C.J. (Eds.). (2015). Keywords for Asian American Studies. NYU Press.

Although “populism” is a term that has been rigorously discussed and theorized in political science and communication studies, the term has received special attention ever since the political rise and presidency of Donald Trump. But what does populism actually mean, and how can we trace the lineage of populist conservative discourses that prefigured the Trump presidency?To guide us through the rhetorical history of this fraught concept, we are joined on the show today by Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His recently published book, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, tells a captivating story of how conservative politicians and rhetors from the mid-20th-century to the present have appealed to the values of “the people.” Johnson elucidates how the conservative variant of populism has reduced the category of “the American people” through its focus on a possessive individualism constantly under threat by new ways of being and modes of organization. This sense of “the people under siege” has been undergirded by a reactionary response to blackness, which is ultimately traceable to the US's foundation in settler-colonialism and chattel slavery. In our discussion, we talk through several of the rhetorical case studies in Johnson's book, including the political ascendency and presidency of Ronald Reagan, the 1994 midterm elections and the year of the “angry white male,” the astroturfed revanchist “Tea Party” surge during the Obama presidency, and the rise of Donald Trump and the contemporary right-wing. Finally, we discuss some alternative methods of articulating “the people” that might help to expand, rather than reduce, the meaning of US popular democracy.References:Beasley, V. B. (2011). You, the people: American national identity in presidential rhetoric (Vol. 10). Texas A&M University Press.Cooper, M. (2017). Family values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism. MIT Press.Corrigan, L. M. (2020). Black feelings: Race and affect in the long sixties. Univ. Press of Mississippi.DiPiero, T. (2002). White men aren't. Duke University Press.Goldberg, J. (2009). Liberal fascism: The secret history of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change. Crown Forum.Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, 1707-1791.Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press on Demand.Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair. Fordham Univ Press.Kelsie, A. E. (2019). Blackened Debate at the End of the World. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 52(1), 63-70.King Watts, E. (2017). Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(4), 317-333.Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.Lee, M. J. (2006). The populist chameleon: The people's party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the populist argumentative frame. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(4), 355-378.Lee, M. J. (2014). Creating conservatism: Postwar words that made an American movement. MSU Press.Matheson, C. (2016). “What does Obama want of me?” Anxiety and Jade Helm 15. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(2), 133-149.Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.Moffitt, B. (2020). Populism. John Wiley & Sons.Moten, F. (2013). Blackness and nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(4), 737-780.Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and opposition, 39(4), 541-563.Nash, G. H. (2014). The conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945. Open Road Media.Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity. Univ. Press of Mississippi.Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.Vats, A. (2014). Racechange is the new Black: Racial accessorizing and racial tourism in high fashion as constraints on rhetorical agency. Communication, Culture & Critique, 7(1), 112-135.White, K. C. (2018). The branding of right-wing activism: The news media and the Tea Party. Oxford University Press.Wright, M. M. (2015). Physics of blackness: Beyond the middle passage epistemology. U of Minnesota Press.

In his most recent book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Harvard University cognitive psychologist and noted Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker argues that “rationality” is what distinguishes good thinkers from bad, that societies which encourage rationality are superior to those that do not, and that making the world a better place requires that we all think more rationally about our past, present, and future. Sounds plausible, right? In making these sweeping claims, though, Pinker wholly ignores relevant research and writing in disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, which have already provided crucial insights into the very questions he claims to be answering for the first time. Pinker's “disciplinary drift” is the focus of today's show, in which Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Nathan Pensky, a literary scholar and critic who reviewed Pinker's latest for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the review, Nathan explains why Pinker's wanton disregard for existing humanities scholarship is so galling, and he contrasts this with the approaches of more generative and thoughtful interdisciplinary scholars such as Anil Seth, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist and author of Being You: A new science of consciousness. Unlike Pinker, Seth engages deeply with existing scholarly debates in the humanities–in particular, the field of philosophy of mind–before introducing a STEM innovation that bears directly on philosophers' existing questions. Nathan goes on to argue that Pinker's work is simply more rude than Seth's, reminding us of the value of basic respect and dignity in scholarly writing. To conclude this episode, Alex introduces Nathan and Calvin to a fun new game: “Pinker or Stinker?” He introduces three quotations: two of them are real excerpts from Pinker's latest work of discipline-drifting drivel, and one is a stinker–a fake quote written by Alex in his best imitation of Pinker's trademark style. Will Nathan & Calvin be able to tell the difference? Can you? Play along while you listen, and if you get them all correct, shoot us an email or a Twitter DM to receive your complimentary re:verb t-shirt!ReferencesDwyer, P., & Micale, M. (Eds.). (2021). The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence. Bloomsbury Publishing.Pensky, N. (2021, Oct. 29). Steven Pinker's Disciplinary Drift. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Pensky, N. (2021, Dec. 2) Finding the poet of ‘Paradise Lost'. The Boston Globe.Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Viking. Pinker, S. (2019). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin. Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin.Seth, A. (2021). Being you: A new science of consciousness. Penguin.

One year ago this week, a large crowd of Trump supporters disrupted what ought to have been boring and bureaucratic work: Congress's certification of Joe Biden's electoral victory over then-President Trump. Instead, a massive melee ensued, resulting in five people dead and over a hundred wounded–mostly Capitol and Metropolitan Police Officers. Loyal re:verb listeners will recall our episode from shortly thereafter, in which we provided our initial spit-takes on the events themselves as well as Twitter's related banning of Trump's official account.On today's show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie return with our most up-to-date thoughts on the meaning and significance of the Jan. 6 attack. We consider questions like: How much emotional energy did and does this incident warrant? Aren't there more systemic issues that dwarf this by comparison? Or, is it actually misguided to dissociate Jan. 6 from larger problems plaguing the U.S. political system and the world? Meanwhile, one year into Joe Biden's neoliberal presidency, how can we draw clear lines between the governance offered by the two parties? If we can't, is it rational to be concerned about one party attempting (and failing) to subvert a victory by the other? And if they are distinguishable, what areas of policy reveal the sharpest distinctions? We air our nuanced disagreements on these topics, as well as our much clearer agreement on the horror of far-right violence and bipartisan failures to address climate change.One twist on last year's discussion, though, is that we offer a close reading this time – specifically, we analyze Tucker Carlson's recent Patriot Purge documentary for FOX Nation, which provided the definitive far-right revisionist narrative of what happened on Jan 6. We unpack the documentary's many bizarre arguments by analogy, such as Carlson's comparison of the post-Jan 6 plight of Trump supporters to the post-9/11 plights of Muslim and Arab Americans. Carlson also equates one faulty media story about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with the many, many examples of world-historically harmful propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media in the run-up to the Iraq War, and he later analogizes the “movement” that protested on Jan. 6 to the Black Lives Matter movement. The documentary culminates in a direct assertion that Jan. 6 was an inside job by the FBI, which we debunk from multiple angles before elaborating on the broader significance of Carlson's rhetorical strategies: the coalitions that they may or may not promise between right and left, and the tactical and theoretical value of analyzing propaganda in terms of political imaginaries and aesthetics.

Last month, former New York Times columnist and current Substacker Bari Weiss took to Twitter to announce “a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”: the University of Austin (UATX). Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, UATX is thus far only a university concept–a pitch for a “new” kind of higher education institution–but the details are murky, it is not accredited, and by its own website's admission, there are no concrete plans for undergraduate degrees until 2024 at the earliest. More than anything, this “University” appears to be an ideological project of social media and op-ed columns, in which its conservative culture warrior backers rail vaguely and haphazardly at existing universities for various tangled, often contradictory sins. Even more oddly, they are proposing a fairly standard liberal arts education, with few obvious “fixes” to traditional models beyond a vague insinuation that their discourses will be “freer” and their students will not be “coddled.”On today's show, Alex and Calvin are joined for the first time by co-producer Mike Laudenbach. Together we unpack two key texts from the University of Austin's public announcement: “We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” by Pano Kanelos (a UATX founding trustee) and “I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken” by Niall Ferguson (another trustee and a legendary cheerleader for the British and American empires). As is typical of our re:joinder episodes, we have lots of laughs taking apart these articles' unsupported, illogical, and downright bizarre claims about the industry we all know so well: academia. But we also do our best to earnestly and fairly engage with key questions that these writers raise (but don't really address), such as:To what extent is higher ed broken, how is it broken, and–perhaps most importantly–who or what broke it? Are there social and intellectual taboos within universities, and if so, which ones bear most significantly on academics' lives and livelihoods? What is the current state of free speech on campuses, and how does it fit into a historical context dating back to the red scares of the Cold War, student protest movements that began in the 1960s and ‘70s, and political correctness debates of the ‘80s-90's? Along the way, we draw on our experiences and knowledge as students, researchers, and faculty, and we propose an innovative institution of our own: re:verb University (RVU). GO VERBIES! Stay tuned, as applications for our august academy will open soon–once we succeed in getting cancelled for truth.Texts Analyzed in this EpisodeFerguson, N. (2021, Nov. 8). I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken. Bloomberg.Kanelos, P. (2021, Nov. 8). We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One. Common Sense (Bari Weiss's Substack).Works and Concepts CitedMishra, P. (2011, Nov. 3). Watch this man. London Review of Books. [Article critiquing Niall Ferguson's apologetic writing about imperialism. Below the article, its author Pankaj Mishra and its subject Niall Ferguson exchange a series of letters debating Ferguson's scholarship.]Nichols, A. (2018, Apr. 2). So-called ‘intellectuals' can't let go of “The Bell Curve.” The Outline. [Article explaining how Andrew Sullivan and other conservative intellectuals continue to circulate modern race science ideas originally espoused in Charles Murray's 1994 The Bell Curve.]Sohege, D. (2021, Apr. 25). In fairness @epkaufm's resistance to academic institutions maintaining their right of academic freedom to call out poor work, and his views on "political minorities", are understandable when placed In the context of his own apparent lack of academic rigor. Twitter. [Tweet highlighting shoddy scholarship in the CSPI study “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.”]

Look upon these films, ye mighty, and despair!In this episode, we're thrilled to welcome back Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University - this time, to discuss his hot-off-the-presses book, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture. In it, Kendall examines how some of the most emotionally-charged moments of 21st century U.S. public memory - from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street to the presidential election of Donald Trump - have resonated in the biggest box office hits of popular cinema.Within each of these conjunctures of hit movies and widely-felt cultural sentiments, Kendall incisively traces a common theme: “the rhetoric of refusal,” in which characters shout “no!” in the face of the powerful and seek societal destruction rather than reform. We discuss some of the topics and films covered in the book, from the influence of the Occupy movement on films like Snowpiercer, Cabin in the Woods, and The Purge, to Kendall's unique reading of 2017's Joker as a musical, to the themes of betrayal, loss, and nostalgic longing that have permeated both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and post-2016 U.S. national politics. We conclude with some thoughts on the collective, affective power of “movie magic,” as well as how nostalgia might be productively re:imagined to move our political culture forward.Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeAhmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.Biesecker, B. A. (2002). Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4), 393-409.Biesecker, B.A. (2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paregoricrhetoric. In K. R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press): pp. 212–247.Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; or, the Formula. Essays critical and clinical, 86.Gunn, J. (2008). Father trouble: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(1), 1-27.Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York University Press.LeMesurier, J. L. (2020). Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino's “This Is America”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50(2), 139-151.Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique, (31), 83-109.Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. John Wiley & Sons.Mitchell, W. T. (2013). Iconology: image, text, ideology. University of Chicago Press.Muensterberg, W. (1985). De gustibus: Notes on the genetics of taste. In Visible religion: Annals of religious iconography (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill).Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling. Duke University Press.Spinoza, B. (2009). The Ethics (R.H.M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Original work published 1677).Villadsen, L. (2017). “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Affect, agency, and the rhetorical trickster.” Presented at Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, Norwich, UK.Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(3), 349-369.

Have you ever wondered why some issues are treated as private and personal, while others are self-evidently public concerns? Meanwhile, certain topics are discussed freely and openly, but only among niche subcultures: local interest groups, expert practitioners, hardcore enthusiasts, and even marginalized communities. How can we better understand these kinds of diverse audience groupings, which are so critical to the circulation of political text and talk? On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a deep-dive into the rhetoric of publicity and counterpublicity. In so doing, we overview the landmark public sphere theories of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as well as later feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory contributions from scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Michael Warner, and Daniel Brouwer. Finally, we highlight the importance of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony for unpacking our inherited ideas about “civil society.” To illustrate this point, we offer an analysis of a recent controversy involving Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, in which activists pursued her into a public restroom to protest her obstruction of immigration reform. Considering the incident and its broader reverberations in media discourses about privacy and civility, we argue that these ideas are contested because hegemony itself is contested. In a deeply unequal society like ours, publicity and counterpublicity are contingent upon groups' positions within hierarchies of power. An early draft of this episode was prepared as a submission for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on “The Trouble with Publics and Counterpublics.” That workshop unfortunately did not take place, due to the unexpected passing of workshop co-leader Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Dan Brouwer was a critical force in rhetorical studies, public sphere theory, and queer studies - a strong mentor, friend, and crucial voice across academic fields. It is in this spirit that we humbly dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr. Daniel Brouwer.Works and Concepts Cited in this EpisodeArendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.Aronoff, K. (2021, 21 Sept.). Joe Manchin's vote isn't that mysterious. Look to the fossil fuel money. The New Republic. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163723/joe-manchin-vote-fossil-fuelAsen, R. (2000). Seeking the “counter” in counterpublics. Communication theory, 10(4), 424-446.Boguslaw, D. (2021, 26 Sept.). Kyrsten Sinema used the winery where she interned to fundraise with private equity. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/kyrsten-sinema-private-equity-tax-loophole/Brouwer, D.C. (2001). ACT-ing UP in congressional hearings. In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.) Counterpublics and the State (pp. 87-110). SUNY Press.Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.Cloud, D.L. (2015). “Civility” as a threat to academic freedom. First Amendment Studies, 49(1), 13-17.Davenport, C. (2021, 19 Sept.). Joe Manchin will craft the U.S. climate plan. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/climate/manchin-climate-biden.htmlFraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 2) (J.A. Buttigieg, Trans.). Columbia University Press.Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. (Originally published in 1962).Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. Univ of South Carolina Press.Klippenstein, K. (2021, 8 Oct.). Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is literally teaching a course on fundraising. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/Luchetta, J. (2021, Oct. 4). Activists ambush Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in public bathroom over immigration, infrastructure. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/04/sen-kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-arizona-immigration-infrastructure/5990516001/Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication theory, 12(4), 446-468.Treene, A. (2021, 7 Oct.). Scoop: Sanders' Sinema spat. Axios. Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/sanders-sinema-spat-harrassment-a8c9f7a2-6579-4800-aa28-43a71fe2639b.htmlWalsh, K. N. (2021, 5 Oct.). Protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom undermined their efforts. The Independent. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-protest-privacy-b1932844.htmlWarner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books.

It's spooky season, and you know what that means: time for another thrilling and chilling re:verb Halloween Special! This year, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined on the mic by Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor and Department Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association. Dr. Calafell's research explores the concept of monstrosity in academia, popular culture, and politics: both how marginalized and minoritized peoples are deemed “monstrous” by dominant cultural imaginaries, and how oppressed groups often reclaim monster status as a means of empowerment. In addition, Dr. Calafell's more recent invited talks have addressed how horror films and TV in the (post-) Trump era have been influenced by monstrous policies such as child separation at the border. In explaining her rich and insightful readings of these diverse cultural works, Dr. Calafell helps us to understand how horror is a contested genre in which racialized, queer, and otherwise-marginalized subjects are both written out of and into our broader imaginaries -- from the underdeveloped queer possibilities of Get Out to the expansive queer utopia imagined by A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In the course of our conversation, we reference a whole slew of recent monster movies and TV (listed in full below), and we nerd out with Dr. Calafell over our shared, undying love for the multimedia work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. We hope you enjoy - Happy Halloween, everyone!Films, TV Shows, and Music Referenced in this EpisodeTim and Eric's Bedtime Stories (2014-2017)On Cinema (2012-present)“Monster” by Kanye West feat. Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Bon IverGet Out (2017)The Curse of La Llorona (2019)The Lords of Salem (2013)A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)It (2017)Us (2019)C.H.U.D. (1984)Check out the production company Luchagore at this linkAcademic Citations:Anzaldúa, G. E. (2007). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.Brooks, Kinitra. Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.Calafell, B. & Fajardo, S. (2019, 6 Nov.). The curse of La Llorona. Esthesis. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.Cohen, J. J. (2018). Monster culture (seven theses). In Classic Readings on Monster Theory (pp. 43-54). ARC, Amsterdam University Press.Johnson, E. Patrick.“‘Quare' Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned FromMy Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.Keeling, Kara.“‘Ghetto Heaven': Set It Off and the Valorization of Black Femme-Butch Sociality.” The BlackScholar 33, no. 1 (2003): 33–46.Levina, M., & Bui, D. M. T. (Eds.). (2013). Monster culture in the 21st century: A reader. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Peterson, L. (2011). Black monster/White corpses: Kanye's racialized gender politics. Racialicious. Retrieved from http://www.racialicious.com/2011/01/18/black-monsterswhite-corpses-kanyes-racialized-gender-politics/Phillips, K. R. (2005). Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture: Horror Films and American Culture. ABC-CLIO.Zaytoun, K. D. (2015). “Now Let Us Shift” the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 40(4), 69-88.

On today's show, we are joined once again by Dr. John Oddo, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, for a retrospective discussion of “War on Terror” rhetoric 20 years after September 11th, 2001. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and national news media have consistently used Us and Them categories of enemy- and threat-construction, drawing on a conceptual metaphor of terrorism as an act of war (as opposed to a criminal act) to justify preventative military action. There have also been some notable shifts in U.S. war rhetoric in recent years: for one thing, references to September 11th as an inciting event have become scarcer as leaders have reframed the fight against global terrorism as an end in itself. And whereas earlier in the war, media and political figures tended to conflate specific terrorist organizations and so-called “state sponsors of terrorism”, they are now more likely to advocate a “targeted” approach: opposing large-scale troop deployments while nevertheless supporting missile attacks, special forces operations, cyberwarfare, and other forms of state violence.After John walks us through the material and social reasons for these continuities and shifts, we analyze specific examples of post-9/11 war propaganda, comparing Larry P. Goodson's November 2001 op-ed “U.S. Troops Must Go In” with Ryan Crocker's August 2021 “Why Biden's Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster.” We examine their rhetorical strategies and discuss the greater implications of how some key tropes have evolved across texts and time: framing the war as a “clash of civilizations,” using the oppression of women and children as justificatory narratives, employing euphemisms like “patience” in foreign policy strategies, and zooming in on U.S. enemies' violence while eliding the violence done by our military and its allies.Lastly, we turn to a discussion of the ongoing drone war in the Middle East and Africa, in which we highlight John's new research project on media construals of drone strike victims. John concludes with a blistering critique of an enduring problem in U.S. political rhetoric: the metaphor of war deaths as “payments” for which we deserve some return, which obscures how inflicting suffering and killing is always an irrevocable moral act. Texts Analyzed in this Episode:Biden, J. (2021, 31 Aug.). Address to the nation on the end of the war in Afghanistan [Speech audio recording]. Transcript, video, and audio available from American Rhetoric: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/joebidenendofafghanistanwar.htmCrocker, R. (2021, 21 Aug.). Why Biden's lack of strategic patience led to disaster. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/us-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.htmlDowd, M. (2001, 18 Nov.). Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/opinion/liberties-cleopatra-and-osama.htmlGoodson, L. P. (2001, 14 Nov.). U.S. troops must go in. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/us-troops-must-go-in.htmlWorks and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1994). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. London: Vintage Books.Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.Goodby, J.E. & Gross, D. (2010, 22 Dec.). Strategic patience has become strategic passivity. The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strategic-patience-has-become-strategic-passivity/Gopal, A. (2021, 6 Sept.). The other Afghan women: In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-womenHodges, A. (2011). The" War on terror" narrative: discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. OUP USA.Oddo, J. (2011). War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us' and ‘Them' in four US presidential addresses. Discourse & Society, 22(3), 287-314.Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's UN Address. Michigan State University Press.Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.Safire, W. (1999, 3 Jan.). On language; Not so fast! The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/magazine/on-language-not-so-fast.html [Contextual analysis on the evolution of the term “strategic patience” and Strobe Talbott's original usage]re:blurb episode on Conceptual MetaphorOur first episode with Dr. Oddo, in which he articulates his theory of war propagandaThe Watson Institute at Brown University's “Costs of War” Project

It's common to see tech journalists make proclamations about how the internet has fundamentally changed the ways that we think, interact, and most importantly, argue with one another. It's also common to see them herald the arrival of a “new science” that promises to provide technical answers to all questions and solve all problems that come with the “disruptive” technologies that have “revolutionized” our world.But has the internet really caused such a drastic divergence from how we operate offline? And do we really need a “new science” for studying things like argument and disagreement, especially when already-established disciplines like rhetoric, philosophy, and the conspicuously named argumentation theory have been studying these topics for millenia?On today's episode, we offer a re:joinder to an infamous 2019 article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singal, entitled “The New Science of How to Argue--Constructively.” In the article, Singal profiles a man who claims to have invented a “new science of disagreement” - the Swedish blogger John Nerst, a self-proclaimed polymath who cut his teeth in the “Intellectual Dark Web”-adjacent, hyper-rationalist online blogosphere. Nerst's “new discipline,” which he calls “Erisology,” claims to have invented a series of tools to help people better navigate arguments and disagreements online. In reality, as we point out, Nerst has merely stumbled into concepts and theories that have been debated by theorists of logic and argumentation for centuries, such as stasis theory, ideographs, and “bracketing” social difference in public deliberations. The distinction, we find, is that Nerst's and Singal's vision of a new culture of disagreement is reliant on rationalist rules that belie an authoritarian social and political agenda. We also discuss how privileged men react when their ideas are challenged for the first time, Jesse Singal's beleaguered Twitter mentions, and what this article truly reveals about the nature of the internet: its power to elevate bloggers to the status of credentialed, peer-reviewed academics, as long as their ideas are laundered through online op-ed columnists.In the spirit of generosity, here is Nerst's follow-up blog explaining & defending his ideas: “A Defense of Erisology”Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:re:blurb on Stasis Theoryre:blurb on IdeographsFahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Hemington, G. (2019, 9 April). A guide for (the) perplexed philosophers: Jesse Singal and the rationalist subculture. Irrationally Speaking. https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/04/09/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-philosophers-jesse-singal-and-the-rationalist-subculture/Mack, P. (2016). Ramus and Ramism: rhetoric and dialectic. In Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts (pp. 23-40). Routledge.

On today's show, Ben and Calvin have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. We begin by discussing Rich's current research on conceptions of work in Black artistic labor, and how that led him back to considering the discursive formations of a Nixon-era economic initiative/slogan known as “Black Capitalism.” We discuss Nixon's policy efforts to revitalize Black economic citizenship as a way of pacifying radical resistance, as well as the ensuing debates among Black intellectuals over labor and capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, Rich connects this historical context to his analysis of contemporary rap artists like Oddisee, helping us to think through how aesthetic production reflects the costs and tolls of neoliberal capitalism.Finally, we close by addressing “toothless” administrative responses to the conservative movement against Critical Race Theory (CRT). We unpack the legal studies origins of CRT as an academic field and theory, its theoretical utility, and the material connections between the conservative interests that developed “broken windows” policing and the ongoing anti-CRT campaign. We invite Rich to “get on his soapbox”, and he articulates a critique of university policies on issues such as this one that disproportionately affect students and faculty of color, including at Carnegie Mellon University.Works and concepts cited in this episodeJoint Statement from AAUP, AHA, AACU, and Pen America re: Legislative Attacks on CRT Ansfield, B. (2020) The Broken Windows of the Bronx: Putting the Theory in Its Place. American Quarterly, (72) 1, 103-127.Ayo, D. (2005). How to Rent a Negro. Lawrence Hill Books.Brimmer, A. (1969). The Economic Potential of Black Capitalism. American Economic Association.Bell, D. (1995) Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory? Boggs, J. (1970). The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism. The Review of Black Political Economy, 27-35. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press.Cross, T. (1969). Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto. Atheneum Press. Everett, P. (2001) Erasure. Graywolf Press.England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed's toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Zed Books.Rufo, C. (2021). Battle Over Critical Race Theory. Wall Street Journal. Speri, A. (2019, March 23). The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional "Black Identity Extremism" Movement. The Intercept. Wacquant, L. J. (2009). Prisons of Poverty. U of Minnesota Press.

We live in a world of unbridled technological and argumentative advancement. A.I. has learned to debate Thanksgiving-table politics against humans. People may soon be using “argument checks” as well as “grammar checks” on their smartphones. Cats and dogs have finally put aside their differences and learned to live in peace by forming a coalition against postal workers. Welcome to the future.Whether this sounds like an irenic utopian ideal or an Orwellian dystopia to you, it is the subject of today's episode! In the first installment of our newest re:joinder series, Disciplining Disciplinary Boundaries, we take aim at an article that feels designed to make humanists pull their hair out: Benjamin Wallace-Wells's “The Limits of Political Debate,” published in The New Yorker. This article tells the story of Project Debater, an artificial intelligence designed to compete in political debate competitions against humans using mountains of empirical evidence and “fifty to seventy” prefabricated argument structures. As we read through the dramatic tale of P.D.'s inception to it's first high-profile defeat in public debate by Harish Natarajan in 2019, we discuss the way that science journalists (and scientists themselves) make strange and fascinating assumptions about the humanities.We also frame our reading of the article with two critical pieces of rhetoric scholarship that help illuminate its various rhetorical pitfalls and spurious assumptions. Jeanne Fahnestock's 1986 classic “Accommodating Science” lays the groundwork for studying science journalism by taxonomizing some typical rhetorical appeals and information transformations journalists use to make hard science more appealing for public audiences (e.g. sacrificing technical details at the expense of telling a dramatic narrative of “discovery”). Finally, we end with Carolyn Miller's 2007 article “What can automation teach us about agency,” and reflect upon the ways that A.I. can only have rhetorical agency if an audience attributes it. This article helps us better understand why Project Debater suffered defeat at the hands of a human, and why this article tells us more about the limits of artificial intelligence rather than “rhetorical persuasion.”Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 330-350.Miller, C. R. (2007). What can automation tell us about agency?. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(2), 137-157.Plato. (2008). Gorgias (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. (Original published c. 380 BCE). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htmSlonim, N., Bilu, Y., Alzate, C., Bar-Haim, R., Bogin, B., Bonin, F., ... & Aharonov, R. (2021). An autonomous debating system. Nature, 591(7850), 379-384.Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, Apr. 11). The limits of political debate. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-limits-of-political-debate

On today's show, the re:verb team gets “meta” - metaPHORICAL, that is! On this re:blurb episode, we discuss the rhetorical and linguistic features of conceptual metaphors, which provide us with a way to make connections between two (often very different) processes. To put it more simply: have you ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Have you ever scolded someone for *wasting* their time, telling them that they could *spend* it doing something more *worthy*? If so, you've been using a very common conceptual metaphor!Listen in as we break down a vast array of conceptual metaphors, from cultural metaphors that mediate our cognition and everyday social life to political metaphors wielded by the powerful to frame tendentious policies and practices in ways beneficial to them. As an example of the latter, we provide an analysis of the mixed political metaphor “sowing discord,” often used in the context of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric about Russia. Despite what the latter metaphor implies, we hope that this episode takes root in your mind and provides music to your ears!Metaphor Theory References:Chilton, P. A. (1996). Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house (Vol. 2). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. The journal of philosophy, 77(8), 453-486.Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and thought, 2, 285-324.Analysis References:Countering Russian Disinformation. (2020, September 23). Center for Strategic and International Studies. Holycross, Jordan & Riggio, Olivia. (2018, September 18). Morning Edition's Think Tank Sources Lean to the Right. FAIR.org.Johnson, Adam. (2016, October 1). NYT Exposes a Favorite Source as War Industry Flack. FAIR.org. Johnson, Adam. (2017, May 8). Lockheed Martin–Funded Experts Agree: South Korea Needs More Lockheed Martin Missiles. FAIR.org. Lipton, Eric & Williams, Brooke. (2016, August 7). How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America's Influence. The New York Times.Shupak, Gregory. (2018, July 26). The Sanctification of NATO. FAIR.org.Further Reading on Conceptual Metaphors:Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5): 563-581.Grady, J. (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes.Grady, J., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science (Series 4), 101-124.Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2013). The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture. Intercultural pragmatics, 10(2), 315-339.

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb's three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter's box and faced off against Calvin's Curveball, a trivia question related to their research. We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb's co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb. We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (@reverb_cast) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!

It's 2021, science is back in charge in America, and we're on a clear path to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. But is it really that simple?On today's show, we talk with Dr. Abby Cartus, a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh, about her thoughts on pandemic rhetoric and policy in the transition from president Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Abby lays out for us the way that the new Biden administration's technocratic rhetoric has sought to reframe debates over COVID policy as purely “technical” and “empirical,” rather than “moral” and “political.” As a result, the administration's approach to managing the virus and keeping citizens safe has amounted to continuing investment in the vaccination deployment that began under Trump. At the same time, ordinary citizens are being told that reducing transmission is a matter of their own personal responsibility, even if they are forced to go to work in unsafe conditions. This rhetorical idiom cultivates the sense that even though scientific experts hold power, they are severely limited in what they can do, and the responsibility for controlling the pandemic rests solely in the hands of individual citizens themselves.This controversy has recently reached a flashpoint in the debate over whether or not public schools in the U.S. can safely reopen at this stage in the pandemic. Abby leads us through the ways that *certain* scientific rhetorics - particularly claims that COVID transmission rates are lower among children and in schools - are being marshalled against teacher unions advocating for safer work environments. In fact, much of the research promoting these claims (often based on selective sample sizes and questionable data-collection practices) is funded by proponents of school privatization, such as the Walton and Gates foundations, who have an economic incentive to demonize and dismantle education workers' collective power.To conclude, Abby summarizes what a more humane policy strategy might look like, in the form of a “paid shutdown” - a short-term closure of nonessential businesses, supplemented by paying furloughed workers to stay home and quarantine. We sign off with a reminder that even when the status quo feels intractable in situations like this, “the way things are” should never be taken as the final word on the way things could/should be!Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Cartus, A. (2020). Education privatization advocates find an opportunity in the school reopening debate. Medium. Feldman, J. (2021). Coronavirus Is an Occupational Disease That Spreads at Work. Jacobin. Feldman, J., Cartus, A., & Prins, S. (2021). Biden's Coronavirus Plan Will Not Prevent Death and Devastation. The Nation. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press. Prins, S., Feldman, J., & Cartus, A. (2021). Teachers and Their Unions Are Demanding Truly Safe Schools Reopening — Not “Ignoring Science.” Jacobin.

Since our last re:verb episode, the US House and Senate certified Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, paving the way for Biden's inauguration -- but not before a large crowd of disgruntled Trump supporters descended on the US Capitol building, in a violent conflict that left five people dead and many wounded. Days later, President Trump's Twitter account had been banned and he was impeached by the House, making him history's first multiply-deplatformed, multiply-impeached president.On today's show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie react to the events of January 6th and their aftermath. We debate to what extent it is accurate and politically useful to call the 1/6 violence a “coup” or an act of “terrorism,” as well as whether our choices of modifiers to describe the event (such as “right-wing”, “GOP”, and/or “fascist”) are even more important. We also consider the apparent hamfistedness of the attackers' planning and goofiness of their presentation, and how these elements relate to the long legacy of white supremacist rhetoric in the US. Lastly, we discuss Twitter's decision to apply its term of service prohibiting “Glorification of Violence” to President Trump's account, ostensibly banning him from the platform for life. Is this an issue of free speech, propaganda, tech-sector labor organizing, hypermediated capitalism, or some combination of all of these? What exactly was the role of social media in the violence that occurred on Jan 6? And if, as seems to be the case, the Internet is undeniably bad now, what broad policy approaches might make it even marginally less bad?Works and Concepts Cited in this EpisodeBrown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software (p. 231). University of Michigan Press.Conger, K., & Isaac, M. (2021, 12 January). Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online Revolt. The New York Times. Fretwell, E. (2021, 13 January). From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry. Al Jazeera.Levy, A. (2020, 2 July). The most liberal and conservative tech companies, ranked by employees' political donations. CNBC. McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2), n2.Silverman, C., & Mac, R. (2020, 3 November). Facebook Cut Traffic To Leading Liberal Pages Just Before The Election. Buzzfeed News.Twitter. (2021, 8 January). Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public culture, 14(1), 49-90.Wong, J.C. (2017, 10 February). Meet the rightwing power players lurking beneath Silicon Valley's liberal facade. The Guardian.