Talk About Talk

Our guest is Carolyn Skinner. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University, where she teaches courses on women’s rhetoric and the history of rhetoric, as well as courses in writing. Prof. Skinner is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the speech and writing of nineteenth-century American women physicians. Prof. Skinner’s work has appeared in Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.We discuss Prof. Skinner’s article “‘She Will Have Science’: Ethos and Audience in Mary Gove’s Lectures to Ladies” published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.3 (July, 2009): 240-259.

Our guest is Christian Lundberg. He is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Professor Lundberg’s current research focuses on theories of the public sphere as a social and discursive form, and on the animating principles for public discourses and identities. He is interested in these questions both at the level of theories of the public, and at the level of specific practices of public discourse. At the level of theories of the the public, his current project “Lacan in Public” works through the implications of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis for thinking the rhetorical character of publics as social formations and of the public discourses that circulate within them. In addition, Professor Lundberg has written a number of articles that unpack forms of discourse constituting specific publics, with special attention to the intersection between publics and religious discourse in Islam and Evangelical Christianity.At the level of specific practices of public discourse and pedagogy, his work focuses on rhetorical theory, and on debate and public speaking as critical democratic forms.On this program we discuss Professor Lundberg’s essay entitled “Dueling Fundamentalisms” published in Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies 4 (March, 2007): 106-110.

Our guest is Janis L. Edwards, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama where she teaches courses in rhetoric and political communication. Her research interests focus on rhetorical dimensions of media and memory, visual rhetoric, and gender and political communication. Her research has been published in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Quarterly, PS/Political Science and Politics, and Women’s Studies in Communication, and in numerous anthologies. She is the author of Political Cartoons in the 1988 Presidential Campaign: Image, Metaphor, and Narrative (1996) and edited Gender and Political Communication in America: Rhetoric, Representation, and Display, forthcoming, 2009.We discuss Prof. Edwards’s chapter “Visualizing Presidential Imperatives: Masculinity as an Interpretive Frame in Editorial Cartoons,” in Janis Edwards Ed., Gender and Political Communication in America: Rhetoric, Representation, and Display (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009): in press.

Our guest is Jerry Hauser. He is Professor of Communication and College Professor of Distinction in Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. For the past decade his work has focused on vernacular rhetoric. His award winning book Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (1999), argued for the place of everyday discourse as an alternative index of public opinion to opinion polling. His approach emphasizes examining how the active public engaged by an issue, a problem, or political conditions actually responds to official discourse. Since publication of Vernacular Voices, Prof. Hauser and his students have been examining how ideas, commitments, and opinions circulate through communities, and sometimes the larger society, through everyday discourse. They have treated these vernacular exchanges as an important mode of influence on public problems. They find these non-official, often informal exchanges are an important way by which we perform political relations through an ongoing negotiation over how we shall act and interact.We discuss Prof. Hauser’s chapter “Moral Vernaculars and Rhetorics of Conscience,” in Patricia Bizzell Ed., Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005): 11-24.

Our guest is Jonathan Alexander. He is a Professor of English and Campus Writing Director at the University of California, Irvine, CA. Prof. Alexander is the author of Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice of Composition Studies and Digital Youth: emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web; co-author of Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies and Argument Now: A Brief Rhetoric; and co-editor of Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing and Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others.We discuss Prof. Alexander’s chapter “‘A Real Effect on the Gameplay’: Computer Gaming, Sexuality, and Literacy,” in Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher Eds., Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (Hounds Mills, UK: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007): 167-189.