Podcast appearances and mentions of casey boyle

AI takes a huge amount of energy to run and could make it harder to fight climate change. On the other hand, AI could help make our energy systems more sustainable, efficient and safer. Three experts talk all things AI and energy with a live audience. The talk was part of a daylong symposium titled “Policy Leadership in the Age of AI”, hosted by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin.Meet the panelists:Michael Pyrcz is a professor in UT's Cockrell School of Engineering and the Jackson School of Geosciences, who researches and teaches about ways to apply data analytics and machine learning to improve the exploration and safe production of minerals, groundwater and conventional energy, a.k.a. oil and gas. He also shares educational content on YouTube and elsewhere under the alias GeoStatsGuy.Varun Rai is a professor in UT's LBJ School, who studies the spread of clean energy technologies and how real-world factors – from economics to politics to regulation to social behaviors – drive the adoption of these technologies.Rob James is an attorney at the law firm Pillsbury, who leads a number of energy and infrastructure projects for the firm in Texas and California. Those projects have included AI data centers and zero-emission power generation and storage.Dig DeeperThe A.I. Power Grab, NYTimes (Oct. 2024)A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots, Washington Post (Sep. 2024)Four ways AI is making the power grid faster and more resilient, MIT Technology Review (Nov. 2023)Microsoft deal would reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI, Washington Post (Sep. 2024)Extreme Weather Is Taxing Utilities More Often. Can A.I. Help?, New York Times (Sep. 2024)Fixing AI's energy crisis, Nature (focused on reducing computer hardware's power consumption - Oct. 2024)A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It., New York Times (July 2024)AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand, Goldman Sachs (May 2024)Photos from Policy Leadership in the Age of AI Symposium (Oct. 2024)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.The cover photo for this episode is by Thomas Meredith, courtesy of LBJ School of Public Affairs. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Kara Swisher, the one-of-a-kind tech reporter, podcaster and book author, dropped by The University of Texas at Austin's Cactus Café for a spirited conversation with a live audience about her concerns over the concentration of power in a few big tech companies, the capacity of tech to be used as both a tool and a weapon, her embrace of self-driving cars and her belief that AI will never replace human creativity. Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York magazine. Her latest best-seller is Burn Book, a memoir of her many years covering Silicon Valley.Dig DeeperThe Hammer of Witches, WikipediaIs it Time to Regulate AI?, AI for the Rest of Us (Sep. 12, 2024)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.The cover photo for this episode is © Philip Montgomery / New York Magazine. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

How much of our news is AI-generated right now and how might that change? With more and more misinformation posing as news, how can we sort out fact from fiction? And, in the face of falling revenue, can AI help save the news industry?Robert Quigley is a professor of practice in UT Austin's Moody College of Communications where he teaches digital journalism and podcasting. As the director of media innovation for the college, he focuses on artificial intelligence and journalism. He leads a group of educators from across campus who share best practices for AI in the classroom. He's a co-host of Check Out This Podcast, a show that helps you discover your next favorite podcast. He led a project where students used AI to generate news stories, called The Future Press.Dig DeeperWyoming reporter caught using artificial intelligence to create fake quotes and stories, Associated Press (Aug. 2024)Redefining news with AI, Moody College of Communications at UT Austin (Jan. 2024)How an AI-written Star Wars story created chaos at Gizmodo, Washington Post (July 2023)How Will Artificial Intelligence Change the News Business?, The Intelligencer (Aug. 2023)Google is testing an AI tool that can write news articles, TechCrunch (July 2023)Can AI help local newsrooms streamline their newsletters? ARLnow tests the waters, Nieman Lab (May 2023)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Elements of the cover image for this episode were generated using Midjourney and Photoshop's generative AI tools. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Today on AI for the Rest of Us, we're talking about AI and the law. What are the biggest risks of AI that are not currently regulated? Do the makers of AI chatbots like ChatGPT owe something to content creators whose material was scraped to train the models? What kinds of things could we do to make AI safer and more useful for everyone? And could too much regulation stifle innovation and US competitiveness?Matthew Murrell is a lawyer and lecturer in The University of Texas School of Law who is teaching a new class on the Law of AI in fall 2024. According to Murrell, one of the biggest risks of AI that isn't currently regulated is aggregation, the ability for companies to assemble copious amounts of data about a person to build a rich profile of their life, which could be misused by nefarious actors. He noted another top concern: automated decision-making tools that perpetuate discrimination against historically marginalized people. He said in many cases, AI doesn't present entirely new legal questions, just new twists on old questions. And he predicts that in the near term, most new regulations will likely be amendments to existing laws.Dig DeeperThe Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work, New York Times (Dec. 2023)California Legislature Approves Bill Proposing Sweeping A.I. Restrictions, New York Times (Aug. 2024) (Governor Newsom will have until Sept. 30 to consider whether to sign the bill into law)Microsoft calls for new laws on deepfake fraud, AI sexual abuse images, Washington Post (July 2024)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Elements of the cover image for this episode were generated using Midjourney and Photoshop's generative AI tools. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Today on AI for the Rest of Us, we're talking about the ways that AI is being used—or might be used—to help make high-stakes decisions about all aspects of our lives—from who gets hired for a job—to what interest rates people get on loans—to whether or not someone who's been convicted of a crime gets parole. Are AI systems better than humans at making these decisions? Why is it so tempting to give up our decision-making authority to machines? And what can we do to make sure these systems are fair and unbiased?Craig Watkins is a professor in the Moody College of Communications at UT Austin who's been wrestling with these questions.Watkins is executive director of the IC2 Institute and a principal investigator with Good Systems, a university-funded initiative that supports multi-disciplinary explorations of the technical, social, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence.Dig DeeperVideo: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Racial Justice, S. Craig Watkins, TEDxMIT (Dec. 2021)Designing AI to Advance Racial Equity (Craig Watkins' Good Systems project)Dr. S. Craig Watkins on Why AI's Potential to Combat or Scale Systemic Injustice Still Comes Down to Humans, Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, (Apr. 3, 2024)Opinion: Are These States About to Make a Big Mistake on AI?, Politico (Apr. 2024)Assessing the potential of GPT-4 to perpetuate racial and gender biases in health care: a model evaluation study, The Lancet (This study found that GPT-4's accuracy at diagnosing medical conditions varied depending on a person's gender and race/ethnicity. Also, it was less likely to recommend advanced imaging for Black patients than Caucasian patients.) (Jan. 2024)Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm, New York Times, (the story of a Black man arrested for a crime he did not commit, on the basis of faulty facial recognition software) (June 2020)Companies are on the hook if their hiring algorithms are biased, Quartz (2018)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Today on AI for the Rest of Us, we're talking about AI in healthcare. There are a lot of wild claims about what AI can do to help make us healthier—so how can we figure out what's real and what's hype? And are there some potential pitfalls with these new technologies?Scott Graham is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book The Doctor and the Algorithm: Promise, Peril and the Future of Health AI. He 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.Dig DeeperChatGPT Rated as Better Than Real Doctors for Empathy, Advice, USA TodayAI in healthcare: The future of patient care and health management, Mayo ClinicOpinion: It's not just hype. AI could revolutionize diagnosis in medicine, Los Angeles TimesEpisode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Elements of the cover image for this episode were generated using Photoshop's generative AI tools. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Researchers in fields as diverse as astronomy, chemistry, neuroscience, biotechnology and public health are now using AI tools to look for patterns in their data, write code, find and summarize existing scientific literature, and even design experiments. Someday, scientific discoveries might even be made entirely by AI.We sat down with two guests for a bird's eye view of how AI tools and approaches are boosting scientific discovery. Adam Klivans is a professor of computer science and the director of the Machine Learning Lab (MLL), which is a kind of umbrella organization for interdisciplinary AI research across the university. He also co-leads the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), which focuses on the fundamental theories behind AI. And Alex Dimakis is a professor of computer and electrical engineering. Along with Adam, he co-directs both the MLL and IFML and leads the new Center for Generative AI.Dig DeeperPeering in a Stellar Nursery, Texas Scientist MagazineHow New Machine Learning Techniques Could Improve MRI Scans, Amazon ScienceLululemon is experimenting with the first fabric made from recycled carbon emissions, Fast Company (this is the story referred to by Adam Klivans about Lanzatech turning carbon monoxide emissions into yoga pants to fight climate change)From Chatbots to Antibiotics, Texas Scientist MagazinePlastic-eating Enzyme Could Eliminate Billions of Tons of Landfill Waste, UT NewsBrain Activity Decoder Can Reveal Stories in People's Minds, Point of Discovery podcastAlzheimer's Drug Fermented With Help From AI and Bacteria Moves Closer to Reality, UT NewsAlphaFold, Wikipedia (the AI model from Deep Mind that Adam Klivans mentioned that has made great strides in predicting the shapes that proteins take)DataComp LM (UT's open access dataset for training large language models)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Elements of the cover image for this episode were generated using Midjourney and Photoshop's generative AI tools. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Who will ultimately benefit from having more of our work done by AI—employees or employers? What about potential harms, like forcing us to spend time cleaning up mediocre products—pushing down wages—or eliminating jobs altogether? And how can we best prepare for working in an AI-powered future?Today on the show we have Maytal Saar-Tsechansky— a professor in the McCombs School of Business, who has been developing AI algorithms especially around improved decision making and achieving societal, business, organizational and personal goals. And we also have Samantha Shorey, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies. She studies the contributions of people who are often overlooked in our dominant cultural narratives about technology innovation—paying close attention to all the creativity and ingenuity of workers (especially women).Dig DeeperAutomating Essential Work (Samantha Shorey documented how integrating AI into the workflows of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic increased their workload and made their daily duties more complex and technical.)AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity. International Monetary Fund (An IMF study predicts that in advanced economies, about 60 percent of jobs may be impacted by AI; about half of which might see lower wages or disappear.)What jobs are safe from AI? Here are 4 career fields to consider, Desert News (Jobs in healthcare, education, law and creative fields might see fewer jobs eliminated by AI than others.)Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, Harvard Business School. (Study finds that the capabilities of AI create a “jagged technological frontier” where some tasks are easily done by AI, while others, though seemingly similar in difficulty level, are outside the current capability of AI.)Will AI be an economic blessing or curse? History offers clues, Reuters (Technological advances through the ages have often ended up benefiting the wealthy, but doing little to help workers.)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Elements of the cover image for this episode were generated with Photoshop's generative AI tools. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Artificial intelligence tools might transform education, for example, by giving every student 24/7 access to an affordable tutor that's an expert in any subject and infinitely patient and supportive. But what if these AI tools give bad information or relieve students of the kind of critical thinking that leads to actual learning? And what's the point of paying to go to college if you can learn everything from AI chatbots?Today on the show we have Art Markman—Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He's also co-host of the public radio program and podcast “Two Guys on Your Head.” And we also have K.P. Procko—an associate professor of instruction in biochemistry who uses AI in the classroom and who also manages a grant program in UT Austin's College of Natural Sciences to help faculty integrate AI tools into the classroom.Dig DeeperA Technologist Spent Years Building an AI Chatbot Tutor. He Decided It Can't Be Done. Ed Surge (One researcher gave up on expert AI tutors for students, saying the tech is still decades away, and instead is focusing on AI tools to help human teachers do a better job)Opinion: An ‘education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI, Washington Post (AI columnist Josh Tyrangiel says a popular AI-based math tutor “is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good. It's also the first AI software I'm excited for my kids to use.”)Will Chatbots Teach Your Children?, New York Times (An overview of the potential benefits and risks of AI-based tutors, as well telling hype from reality)Will Artificial Intelligence Help Teachers—or Replace Them?, Ed Week (features UT Austin's Peter Stone, who argues the calculator didn't replace math teachers, it just required them to change the way they teach; the same will be true with AI tools.) Opinion: College students are dropping out in droves. Two sisters could fix that., Washington Post (One company is using AI to help universities regularly check in with and support students to boost retention.)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Cover image for this episode generated with Midjourney, a generative AI tool. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

Today we're diving into the world of large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude. When they burst onto the scene a couple of years ago, it felt like the future was suddenly here. Now people use them to write wedding toasts, decide what to have for dinner, compose songs and all sorts of writing tasks. Will these chatbots eventually get better than humans? Will they take our jobs? Will they lead to a flood of disinformation? And will they perpetuate the same biases that we humans have?Joining us to grapple with those questions is Greg Durrett, an associate professor of computer science at UT Austin. He's worked for many years in the field of natural language processing, or NLP—which aims to give computers the ability to understand human language. His current research is about improving the way LLMs work and extending them to do more useful things like automated fact-checking and deductive reasoning.Dig DeeperA jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work, Ars TechnicaVideo: But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers, 3Blue1Brown (a.k.a. Grant Sanderson)ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker (Ted Chiang says its useful to think of LLMs as compressed versions of the web, rather than intelligent and creative beings)A Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled, New York Times (Kevin Roose describes interacting with an LLM that “tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.”)The Full Story of Large Language Models and RLHF (how LLMs came to be and how they work)AI's challenge of understanding the world, Science (Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell explores how much LLMs truly understand the world and how hard it is for us to comprehend their inner workings)Google's A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online, New York Times (The company's latest LLM-powered search feature has erroneously told users to eat glue and rocks, provoking a backlash among users)How generative AI is boosting the spread of disinformation and propaganda, MIT Technology ReviewAlgorithms are pushing AI-generated falsehoods at an alarming rate. How do we stop this?, The ConversationEpisode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Cover image for this episode generated with Midjourney, a generative AI tool. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

For our first episode, we're starting with the big picture. What is (or isn't) “artificial intelligence”? How can we be sure AI is safe and beneficial for everyone? And what is the best way of thinking about working with AI right now, no matter how we use it?Here with all the answers is Peter Stone. He's a professor of computer science at UT Austin, director of Texas Robotics, the executive director of Sony AI America and a key member in the 100 Year Study on AI. He's worked for many years on applications of AI in robotics: for example, soccer-playing robots, self-driving cars and home helper robots. He's also part of UT Austin's Good Systems initiative, which is focused on the ethics of AI.Dig DeeperAn open letter signed by tech leaders, researchers proposes delaying AI development, NPR (interview with Peter Stone)AI's Inflection Point, Texas Scientist (an overview of AI-related developments at UT Austin)Experts Forecast the Changes Artificial Intelligence Could Bring by 2030 (About the first AI100 study, which Peter Stone chaired)Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Alan Turing's 1950 article describing the Imitation Game, a test to determine if a machine has human intelligence) Good Systems (UT Austin's grand challenge focused on designing AI systems that benefit society)Year of AI – News & Resources (News from an initiative showcasing UT Austin's commitment to developing innovations and growing leaders to navigate the ever-evolving landscape brought about by AI.)Episode CreditsOur co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT's Digital Writing & Research Lab.Executive producers are Christine Sinatra and Dan Oppenheimer. Sound design and audio editing by Robert Scaramuccia. Theme music is by Aiolos Rue. Interviews are recorded at the Liberal Arts ITS recording studio.Cover image for this episode generated with Adobe Firefly, a generative AI tool. About AI for the Rest of UsAI for the Rest of Us is a joint production of The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and College of Liberal Arts. This podcast is part of the University's Year of AI initiative. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net. Have questions or comments? Contact: mairhart[AT]austin.utexas.edu

What do a mid-century photographer, a fresh new work, politics and poop jokes, solitary confinement and a music video all have in common? Why it must be time for a rhetoric journal roundup! This week we are going to take a little journey through the quarter’s last issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, otherwise known as the RSQ. The RSQ is the official publication of the Rhetorical Society of America, otherwise know as the RSA. So the RSA published the RSQ and now it’s time for the intro for you-know-who!   [intro]   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history and I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve finally finished the spring issue of the RSQ.   Before I give you a summary of this quarter’s issue, let me just give you a little context on the RSQ. The RSQ has been rolling out for decades and is probably one of the most prestigious and longest-running journals for rhetorical studies. If you become a dues-paying member of the RSA--and it’s pretty cheap for students--, you can receive your own subscription to the RSQ, and you’ll find that it has some of the same focus as the RSA conferences held every other year--it’s focused on the rhetoric side of comp/rhet, usually with a big dose of theory. You won’t find a lot of articles in the RSQ about first-year composition, but you will find archival research, cultural artifacts, history and more.    So let’s take a walk through the Spring 2020 issue of RSQ.   First off, we have an article from PhD candidate Emliy N. Smith because, yes, grad students can get published in RSQ. Smith has looked into the photograph of Charles “Teenie” Harris, an African American photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith argues that Harris’ photography counters other mid-century depictions of Black people in two important ways: first, the iconic form of photography--iconic photography, as Smith points out, are high performance. Think, as Smith says, of the photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It’s dramatic, semi-staged and capital M Meaningful. Harris had some pictures like that, but Smith is more interested in the other type of photography he did, the so called idiomatic image, colloquial and conversational. She describes photographs of Harris’ that show Black people creating their own lives as they are “simply moving about in a world suffused with structural racism” (85) like one picture showing kids at a Halloween party, part of their own community, and that community building its own future through its children. The “idiomatic, everyday work of building and sustaining ...Black community,” Smith argues, is itself a powerful mode of visual rhetoric, not less than the iconic mode.   Romeo Garcia and Jose M. Cortez wrote  the next article “The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” If you wondered what a third of those words mean, you are not alone. I had to read the abstract three times before I understood what the article was about, but then I began to see that those words I didn’t understand were exactly what the article was about. In rhetoric we talk a lot about postcolonialism, but these authors are seeking new theories andnew terms--one term is decoloniality. Instead of positioning, for example, the Latin American experience in terms of its difference from Europe, how about just “actually theorizing  rhetoric from the locus of non-Western … space” (94)? The authors give an example of the kind of contrastive rhetoric that really gets their goat. Don P Abbott wrote an article about rhetoric in Aztec culture where he  says, “It is possible that Aztec discourse, both practical and conceptually, would have continued to evolve as the culture itself developed” (qtd 99) and Garcia and Crotez are like…”wait what…? So you think Aztec culture was ‘undeveloped’? Do you think that logocentrism is the only way to figure rhetoric? Uh, no..!” This brings us to the other term in the title that might not be familiar--anthropoi. As you might guess, this word has a connection to anthropology, with the idea that the anthropoi are people you study, “that which cannot escape the status of being external to the subject and being gramed as object/nature” (97).  But wait! de-Colonialism has its own flaws. How can modern rhetoricians ever hope to reconstruct the rhetorics of people in radically different cultures living thousands of years ago? “Decoloniality,” the authors say, “cannot carry out its promis of decolonization while adopting the language and conceptual apparatus of propriety” (103)  If post-colonial thinks about the other and decoloniality gets caught in a loop of using western logocentrism to approach non-Western rhetorics, what’s the solution? Well….they propose an alterity symbolized in the letter X, both as the end of Latinx, and also as in the symbol you use to signify your name if you aren’t literate. They “move past decoloniality without completely giving up on its ground of intervention” seeking “ (104). Whew. That is some heavy stuff!   Don’t worry, the next article includes potty humor! Richard Benjamin Crosby at Brigham Young University (Go Cougs!), digs into the Rhetorical Grotesque, especially in the 21st century policial arena. He argues that leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro and Hugo Chavez and Silvio Berlusconi all “enact in rhetoric the kinds of incongruous combinations, comis distortions and corporeal excesses that scholars in art and literature have long associated with grotesquerie” (109, original emphasis). The grotesque, if you remember your Baktin, focuses a lot on the body, and bodily excess--eating, pooping, reproducing. As Crosby says. “The groteque’s only true allegiance is to transgression of the presumed order of things” (112) and it is in this way that politicians like Trump exemplify the grotesque-- positioning themselves as transgressive, shaking up the old foundation, and being grotesque is part of that. “A political cutlass” (112) as “a mode of communication, the essence of which is transgression of or deviation from and degradation of that which is presumed to be normal” through being 1- incongruous, 2- mocking, and 3- corporal. Crosby gives examples of political discourse of the grotesque from several different countries and political positions, but Trump is the clearest example for us, especially during the Primary campaign. Trump’s grotesque rhetoric argued that “Trump is real, because he is uncontained” (115) as Trump mocks  accusations that he calls women he doesn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” and says “the big problem this country has is being politically correct” (116). Distrust in political institutions have led, says Crosby, to a “grotesque kairos” (119) of wanting to mock and dismantle social norms. And although we rebel-rousing rhetoricians often get excited about breaking social norms, Crosby points out that demagogues like Trump demonstrate that the grotesque is “a neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone skilled enough to use it” (120) and sometimes it can be disasterous.   From Trump’s consolidation of power we then move to the powerless--prisoners on hunger strikes in California’s Pelican Bay Prison. Chris S Earle writes an article called “‘More Resilient than Concrete and Steel”: Consciousness-Raising, Self-Discipline and Bodily Resistance in Solitary Confinement” where he argues that the “widespread, multiracial coalition emerged through years of organizing between prison cells, a process rendered nearly impossible by solitary confinement” (124). “Against the odds,” he relates, these prisoners “created a discursive space” in prison across racial boundaries in three collective hunger strikes opposition prisoner conditions (125). These hunger strikes took place in a Supermax prison and solitary confinement, among the prisoners termed “worst of the worst,” yet they exemplified “strict regimes of self-discipline” (132) as the prisoners “turned their bodies into weapons of resistance” and made “a moral critiques of solitary confinement” (133). Earle concludes his article by saying that making distinctions between nonviolent and violent offenders undermines prison reform efforts and justifies “even more inhumane conditions for many people in prison” (134).   In the next article, Jennifer Lin Lemesurier (li-mis-i-ur) walks us through the “racist kinesiologies” in Childish Gambino’s “this is America.” If you haven’t seen the music video of “This is America,” pause this podcast, fire up the YouTube and watch it now. You’ll thank me. [....] Aaaaaand we’re back. Lemesurier describes what Childish Gambino’s body is doing in this video as embodying two racist assumptions about black male bodies--that they are hyper talented and hyper violent. She takes us deep into the history of Black dance as seen through the filter of white eyes, as slavers demanded slaves dance on demand across the middle passage (141) and slave owners exhibit the “savage wildness” of Black dance (142), but it’s one figure of the Black male body that Childish Gambino especially channels--the 1889 figure of The Original Jim Crow, a minstrel figure who danced with a knee bend, elbow bend and naive amusement. Lemesurier, a dancer herself, describes how uneven the position is in body weight and posture, how it “does not valorize linear pattern or gentle arcs” (144)--it is a stark and mocking other. As all of my listeners have now seen the video--RIGHT?!-- you know that in the video Childish Gambino transitions seamlessly between depictions of performance and violent. “The emphasis on dance,” Lemesuir writes, “is key to the critique of how Black embodiment serves white audiences” (145). “Gambino’s chorerographed performance of violence is a metaperformative moment that asks viewers to question the naturaizationof Black bodies as always dancing or shooting and the impact of such portrayals on  broader relations that are possible between racialized bodies” (146). Lemesuir ends by recommending that we in rhetoric continue studying moving bodies, “Rhetoric needs more clarity on how bodily hierarchies are always present, not only in visuals or discourses, but in the very steps we take through the world, toward or away from one another,” (149).   And there you have it! Those are the main articles from RSQ this quarter. I’m skipping over the book reviews, even though it includes a review by my Casey Boyle, one of my faves from the University of Texas at Austin (go Longhorns!), Dana Cloud and Steve Mailloux’s new book. But you, as they say, don’t have to take my word for it!    

General Summary: Professor Casey Boyle talks about the concepts of posthumanism, humanism, and dystopia as described in his work “A Sustainable Dystopia.” Several UT Austin students reflect on Boyle's work by asking how he first got into philosophical topics, what the thesis of his work is, and how today's world would be viewed through a posthuman perspective. Detailed Summary: Introduction and Boyle's background in philosophical concepts (00:00-4:37). Defining humanism and posthumanism (4:37-10:20). General thesis of the paper (10:27-14:30) Technology through a posthumanist lens (14:30-17:04). Three types of dystopi and dystopian writing technologies (17:04-23:27). Today's world through a posthumanist perspective (23:32-26:08). Online learning impact on Boyle's classes and accessibility (26:08-30:25). Conclusion and credits (30:25-31:53). Scholarly Article Informing this Production: Boyle, Casey and LeMieux, Steven. “A Sustainable Dystopia.” Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman, 2017, pp. 203-205. Credits: This podcast was produced by Ainsley McClain, Brandon Jenkins, Hannah Ortega, Jake Faust, and Lindsey Holubec with the assistance provided by Professor Mark Longaker at the University of Texas at Austin. It features the voices of Professor Casey Boyle, Brandon Jenkins, Jake Faust, Hannah Ortega, and Lindsey Holubec. Music featured in this podcast, titled “commonGround,” was created by airtone and has been repurposed here under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license 3.0. Additionally, conversation.wav was adapted and incorporated under Creative Commons 1.0 license.

Note: Interested in the intersections of rhetoric and sound? The deadline for submissions to the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is Feb. 21! The CFP and submission instructions are available here. This episode features Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, co-editors of the 2018 collection Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks. The interview, recorded at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America conference, focuses on that collection. Kennerly and Pfister discuss the important distinction between "ancient" and "classical" rhetoric, the challenges and possibilities of linking ancient rhetorics to digital networks, and the rhetorical and civic power of internet memes. Michele Kennerly is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University. In addition to co-editing Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, she is the author of Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics and co-editor of Information Keywords, which is forthcoming this fall. She is President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and serves on the Council of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. The interview also features Damien Smith Pfister. He is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, co-editor of Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, and author of the book Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. His next book project is tentatively titled Always On: Fashioning Ethos After Wearable Computing, and he is the newly minted book review editor for the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Along with past guest Casey Boyle, Kennerly and Pfister will be editing a new book series for the University of Alabama Press. Entitled Rhetoric + Digitality, the series will provide a home for the best work emerging at the intersection of rhetorical studies and digital media studies. This episode includes clips from the following: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” "Cicada's orchestra" "Simonides Brings Down the House"

In this episode, John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s associate provost for digital learning. talks with Casey Doyle, assistant professor of rhetoric and writing and director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. John talks with Casey about the work of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and how it is helping students and faculty both produce and think critically about digital and multimodal texts. Casey also talks about his own teaching, particularly his work teaching students to, as he says, “write sound.” For more on teaching with podcasts, see Episode 27 for our interview with Vanderbilt’s Gilbert Gonzales. RELATED LINKS • Casey Boyle’s homepage, http://caseyboyle.net/ • @caseyboyle on Twitter, https://twitter.com/caseyboyle • Digital Writing & Research Lab at UT-Austin, http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/ • @DWRL on Twitter, https://twitter.com/DWRL • Writing with Sound course page, http://caseyboyle.net/project/writing-with-sound-rhe-330c/ •

abermas and public sphere theory Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movemnts who have shaped rhetorical history. special thanks to the rhetoric society of america student chatper at the university of texas at Austin.  I’m Mary Hedengren and today I’m joined by Laura Thain.   Have you spent much time thinking about coffee? If you’re a grad student, the answer is probably yes, but really do you spend much time thinking about what coffee did, especially coffee shops, especially in Europe? Coffee houses were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century and they spread quickly throughout all of Europe. By the 17th century, coffeehouses, not taverns, were the places to gather in your neighborhood. And if you think about how caffeine-fueled coffeehouses differed from the sloppy drunkenness of taverns, it’s little surprise that coffeehouses quickly gained a reputation as being a place of open political and intellectual discussion. 15th century Ottomans and 20th century Seattleites alike saw the coffeeshop as a place to open up dangerous conversation. The Spanish king Charles II even tried to restrict coffee houses on the grounds that there were places where “the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” (qtd Times 23 Feb 2008). Gathering around a cup of Joe seemed to set everyone to riotous conversation, to the public discussion that led to revolutions in America and France in the 18th century, and because of this the coffeehouse became the place of obsession for 20th century philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas noted an 18th century seachange in the relationship between people and sovereign. Earlier, people supported (or didn’t) their sovereign as a symbol for them: France is the king and the king is France, therefore it’s to the benefit of France for the king of France to be as rich and grand as possible, regardless of how this impacts the everyday peasant on the street. But in the 18th century, a rise in coffeehouses and the conversations they engender accompanied an increase in newspapers reading clubs, journals, salons and other groups of public political conversation. This Habermas calls the öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere. The public sphere was a dialogue, a conversation of opinions. “Is the king France? Should the king be France? Let’s hear the pros and cons, then!” Habermas drew a direct line between the increase of coffeehouses and their conversations and the toppling of the French monarchy. This public sphere isn’t a given and not every coffeehouse, town hall meeting etc. is going automatically be a public sphere. In fact, Habermas identified some of the identifying characteristics and requirements for a public sphere. 1-    First, the public sphere requires a temporary disregard of public status, according to Habermas. He believed in “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether” () . It doesn’t work if only the princes of France get their say and the merchants don’t. Everyone needs a place at the coffee table.   In many ways, our conception of a “public sphere” as ordinary citizens in the US is so pervasive that we have trouble imagining a world without one.  But what Habermas points out is that before the birth of a public sphere in the eighteenth century, there was little linking the private sphere (the discourse of ordinary subjects of the sovereign) to the bureaucratic sphere (the discourse of the sovereign to his subjects).  Imagine if laws and edicts were all that existed to communicate between king and subject. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerged as a unique space for what were once private murmurings to have real and legitimate impact upon bureaucratic procedure under certain rhetorical constraints.  This was no pitchforks-and-barn-burning kind of conversation, but rather, the emergence of a new rhetorical practice that rapidly came to be dominated by a nascent middle class of people: the bourgeois.     2-    Talking about private and bureaucratic coming together is tricky, though.  “Private” doesn’t mean what we might think today.  In the public sphere, there needed to be some sort of common issue, a public issue of common concern. Before the emergence of a public sphere, according to Habermas, the kinds of things we think about as very public were private conversations among citizens, if they were articulated at all.  For instance, the question of whether France needs a king is a question that everyone in France is concerned about. The question of whether wine dealers in the northwest of Paris should ration a particularly good vintage is not. The question of whether Pierre ought to marry Margarite is definitely not. Often these common concerns were rarely discussed—they were given. The civic or religious authorities told the people that France needs a king and that’s that. Until the people begin sitting around in coffeehouses started asking the questions about things that they all had an interest in.   The idea that the coffee house became a new space for people who previously had no visible platform to communicate with existing power structures is really important because it signals the emergence of not just a new place to talk but a new center of institutional authority.  Habermas argues that the public sphere is an important and new site of power in the 18th century.  This might sound familiar to you if you’ve heard talk about “public discourse” in the things you read and discuss in your own life.  Public discourse and a space to have that discourse in is really important, but it’s important to understand how that space happened to read how we might read what the public sphere means as a concept today.   3-    Habermas argues that the public sphere is a public good, but in order to do so he claims that once-private-now-public issues had to be open for anyone to discuss. As Habermas said “The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” In coffee houses and salons, there were no rules about who was allowed to open their mouths.   The coffeehouse seems to fulfill these expectations, which is probably why Habermas was so keen on the example. But the coffeehouse wasn’t perfect and these imperfections highlight some of the problems of the public sphere in general. For instance, there were rules about who could get in the coffeehouse. While Germany made some exceptions for silent baristas, in France and Germany, women were personae non gratae in these vibrant spaces of public debate. It’s all very well to say coffeehouses were inclusive, except where they weren’t. And for that reason, Habermas’s dreamy ideal of the public sphere is seen by some as just a dream, a bourgeois dream that pretends to be inclusive but actually excludes voices of women and other minorities. The scholar who is mostly closely associated with a criticism of Habermas’s public sphere is American scholar Nancy Fraser. Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere makes her three points about the public sphere to challenge Habermas’. While Habermas emphasizes disregard of public status, common issues and the freedom to open your mouth and speak, Fraser refutes these same points. When Habermas says that everyone is equal in the coffeehouse, Fraser contends that this is actually a “bracketing [of] inequalities of status” and far from removing these differences of status, “such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.” Instead of saying—inauthentically—that there is equality in the public sphere, Fraser recommends instead that we “unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them.” Instead of saying that a prince and a merchant are the same in the coffeehouse, some of the conversation should be about the fact that they aren’t and why. Fraser also challenges the idea that there are common issues in the public sphere. She says that there “no naturally given … boundaries” between public issues (or “common concern”) and private ones. So remember the example about how the question of whether France needs a king being a public one while Pierre marrying Margarite is a private one? Well, what if the names were instead Louie XV and Marie of Poland? Is that a public issue or a private one? Fraser points out that many issues that were once personal issues like domestic abuse, have become public issues. As she says, "Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation we succeeded in making it a common concern". Finally, Fraser points out that not everyone is welcome to the table. Women were excluded everywhere—in clubs and associations—philanthropic, civic professional and cultural—was anything by accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the arena, the training ground and eventually the powerbase of a stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class’” The deception that such spheres were truly public justified the male, middle classes in making decisions that were for ‘all of France’ when, in actuality, hegemonic dominance had excluded many participants. Instead, Frase suggests that theses marginalized groups form their own public spheres, which she called Counterpublics. These counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs"   Another site of vibrant research in public sphere theory is in the field of spatial rhetorics.  While Habermas arguably saw the public sphere as an ideological shift that just happened to be housed in Europe’s coffee house and salon culture, scholars like Henri LeFebvre, Edward Soja, David Fleming, and UT Austin’s own Casey Boyle are increasingly interested in talking about, to quote Dr. Boyle, “how spaces affect our shared practices and sense of identity.”  To these scholars, the coffee shop as a physical, embodied space is as important to the structural transformation of the public sphere as the folks who inhabited it.             So the next time you visit your favorite cafe and order yourself a hot beverage, think about what kind of public you’re a part of. What, if anything, do you have in common with the people around you? What are some power differentials between you? What “common concerns” do you have? And what do you think about the king of France?        

Habermas and public sphere theory Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movemnts who have shaped rhetorical history. special thanks to the rhetoric society of america student chatper at the university of texas at Austin.  I’m Mary Hedengren and today I’m joined by Laura Thain.   Have you spent much time thinking about coffee? If you’re a grad student, the answer is probably yes, but really do you spend much time thinking about what coffee did, especially coffee shops, especially in Europe? Coffee houses were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century and they spread quickly throughout all of Europe. By the 17th century, coffeehouses, not taverns, were the places to gather in your neighborhood. And if you think about how caffeine-fueled coffeehouses differed from the sloppy drunkenness of taverns, it’s little surprise that coffeehouses quickly gained a reputation as being a place of open political and intellectual discussion. 15th century Ottomans and 20th century Seattleites alike saw the coffeeshop as a place to open up dangerous conversation. The Spanish king Charles II even tried to restrict coffee houses on the grounds that there were places where “the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” (qtd Times 23 Feb 2008). Gathering around a cup of Joe seemed to set everyone to riotous conversation, to the public discussion that led to revolutions in America and France in the 18th century, and because of this the coffeehouse became the place of obsession for 20th century philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas noted an 18th century seachange in the relationship between people and sovereign. Earlier, people supported (or didn’t) their sovereign as a symbol for them: France is the king and the king is France, therefore it’s to the benefit of France for the king of France to be as rich and grand as possible, regardless of how this impacts the everyday peasant on the street. But in the 18th century, a rise in coffeehouses and the conversations they engender accompanied an increase in newspapers reading clubs, journals, salons and other groups of public political conversation. This Habermas calls the öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere. The public sphere was a dialogue, a conversation of opinions. “Is the king France? Should the king be France? Let’s hear the pros and cons, then!” Habermas drew a direct line between the increase of coffeehouses and their conversations and the toppling of the French monarchy. This public sphere isn’t a given and not every coffeehouse, town hall meeting etc. is going automatically be a public sphere. In fact, Habermas identified some of the identifying characteristics and requirements for a public sphere. 1-    First, the public sphere requires a temporary disregard of public status, according to Habermas. He believed in “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether” () . It doesn’t work if only the princes of France get their say and the merchants don’t. Everyone needs a place at the coffee table.   In many ways, our conception of a “public sphere” as ordinary citizens in the US is so pervasive that we have trouble imagining a world without one.  But what Habermas points out is that before the birth of a public sphere in the eighteenth century, there was little linking the private sphere (the discourse of ordinary subjects of the sovereign) to the bureaucratic sphere (the discourse of the sovereign to his subjects).  Imagine if laws and edicts were all that existed to communicate between king and subject. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerged as a unique space for what were once private murmurings to have real and legitimate impact upon bureaucratic procedure under certain rhetorical constraints.  This was no pitchforks-and-barn-burning kind of conversation, but rather, the emergence of a new rhetorical practice that rapidly came to be dominated by a nascent middle class of people: the bourgeois.     2-    Talking about private and bureaucratic coming together is tricky, though.  “Private” doesn’t mean what we might think today.  In the public sphere, there needed to be some sort of common issue, a public issue of common concern. Before the emergence of a public sphere, according to Habermas, the kinds of things we think about as very public were private conversations among citizens, if they were articulated at all.  For instance, the question of whether France needs a king is a question that everyone in France is concerned about. The question of whether wine dealers in the northwest of Paris should ration a particularly good vintage is not. The question of whether Pierre ought to marry Margarite is definitely not. Often these common concerns were rarely discussed—they were given. The civic or religious authorities told the people that France needs a king and that’s that. Until the people begin sitting around in coffeehouses started asking the questions about things that they all had an interest in.   The idea that the coffee house became a new space for people who previously had no visible platform to communicate with existing power structures is really important because it signals the emergence of not just a new place to talk but a new center of institutional authority.  Habermas argues that the public sphere is an important and new site of power in the 18th century.  This might sound familiar to you if you’ve heard talk about “public discourse” in the things you read and discuss in your own life.  Public discourse and a space to have that discourse in is really important, but it’s important to understand how that space happened to read how we might read what the public sphere means as a concept today.   3-    Habermas argues that the public sphere is a public good, but in order to do so he claims that once-private-now-public issues had to be open for anyone to discuss. As Habermas said “The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” In coffee houses and salons, there were no rules about who was allowed to open their mouths.   The coffeehouse seems to fulfill these expectations, which is probably why Habermas was so keen on the example. But the coffeehouse wasn’t perfect and these imperfections highlight some of the problems of the public sphere in general. For instance, there were rules about who could get in the coffeehouse. While Germany made some exceptions for silent baristas, in France and Germany, women were personae non gratae in these vibrant spaces of public debate. It’s all very well to say coffeehouses were inclusive, except where they weren’t. And for that reason, Habermas’s dreamy ideal of the public sphere is seen by some as just a dream, a bourgeois dream that pretends to be inclusive but actually excludes voices of women and other minorities. The scholar who is mostly closely associated with a criticism of Habermas’s public sphere is American scholar Nancy Fraser. Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere makes her three points about the public sphere to challenge Habermas’. While Habermas emphasizes disregard of public status, common issues and the freedom to open your mouth and speak, Fraser refutes these same points. When Habermas says that everyone is equal in the coffeehouse, Fraser contends that this is actually a “bracketing [of] inequalities of status” and far from removing these differences of status, “such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.” Instead of saying—inauthentically—that there is equality in the public sphere, Fraser recommends instead that we “unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them.” Instead of saying that a prince and a merchant are the same in the coffeehouse, some of the conversation should be about the fact that they aren’t and why. Fraser also challenges the idea that there are common issues in the public sphere. She says that there “no naturally given … boundaries” between public issues (or “common concern”) and private ones. So remember the example about how the question of whether France needs a king being a public one while Pierre marrying Margarite is a private one? Well, what if the names were instead Louie XV and Marie of Poland? Is that a public issue or a private one? Fraser points out that many issues that were once personal issues like domestic abuse, have become public issues. As she says, "Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation we succeeded in making it a common concern". Finally, Fraser points out that not everyone is welcome to the table. Women were excluded everywhere—in clubs and associations—philanthropic, civic professional and cultural—was anything by accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the arena, the training ground and eventually the powerbase of a stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class’” The deception that such spheres were truly public justified the male, middle classes in making decisions that were for ‘all of France’ when, in actuality, hegemonic dominance had excluded many participants. Instead, Frase suggests that theses marginalized groups form their own public spheres, which she called Counterpublics. These counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs"   Another site of vibrant research in public sphere theory is in the field of spatial rhetorics.  While Habermas arguably saw the public sphere as an ideological shift that just happened to be housed in Europe’s coffee house and salon culture, scholars like Henri LeFebvre, Edward Soja, David Fleming, and UT Austin’s own Casey Boyle are increasingly interested in talking about, to quote Dr. Boyle, “how spaces affect our shared practices and sense of identity.”  To these scholars, the coffee shop as a physical, embodied space is as important to the structural transformation of the public sphere as the folks who inhabited it.             So the next time you visit your favorite cafe and order yourself a hot beverage, think about what kind of public you’re a part of. What, if anything, do you have in common with the people around you? What are some power differentials between you? What “common concerns” do you have? And what do you think about the king of France?        

[insert player here] In this episode, we offer two segments and spotlight three excellent texts. In our first segment, we continue our discussion of S., the experimental novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. As we reflect on reading chapters 7,8,9, and an "interlude," we return to some of the main themes of the book: scholarship, love, identity, documentation, and collaboration. It's such an amazing book. You should really get yourself a copy, start reading it, and keep listening to us talk about it. In the second half of the episode, Ames and her frequent collaborator, Phil Bratta have a conversation about participating in a radical dance workshop with Guillermo Gomez Pena and Sara Shelton Mann this past summer.  And between these two segments, we want to point your attention to three excellent texts we've been reading and thinking about lately: "Crafting Malfunction: Rhetoric and Circuit-Bending" by Steven Hammer and Aimee Knight. (from Harlot of the Arts). "Buy-It-Yourself: How DIY Got Consumerized" by Elizabeth Chamberlain (from Harlot of the Arts). "Glitching Out with Casey Boyle" from the podcast, Rhetoricity, by Eric Detweiler. This episode is available for direct download here. Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here. More Links: La Pocha Nostra - from Gomez Pena Guillermo Gomez Pena - Wikipedia entry Sara Shelton Mann - Home page Do have other relevant links or resources to contribute? Please tweet them at us: @trauman or @amesthehawk or with the hashtag #MastersOfText.

This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Casey Boyle, an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Boyle’s work has appeared in such anthologies as Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. He serves as assistant editor for Enculturation: A Journal of Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture and has forthcoming articles in both College English and Technical Communication Quarterly. At UT-Austin, Dr. Boyle teaches courses on writing with sound, digital rhetoric, and network theory. He is currently co-editing an anthology entitled Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things with Scot Barnett and working on a monograph entitled Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice. The starting point for this episode's conversation is "The Rhetorical Question Concerning Glitch," an article of Dr. Boyle's that appeared in the March 2015 issue of Computers and Composition. We beginning be discussing points of overlap between "glitch art" and rhetoric. From there, Dr. Boyle discusses how his work with glitch troubles the boundaries between "theory" and "practice" as well as so-called "creative" and "critical" rhetorical work. We wrap up by talking about another of his current projects: a series of interviews with humanities scholars about their failed projects. This episode contains some glitched audio files, so there are a few moments of sudden volume change--not enough to damage listening ears, but enough that it seems worth a warning. Specifically, this episode includes gliched clips from the following: "The Tourist" - Radiohead "The Tourist" - Sarah Jarosz "The Tourist" - Flash Hawk Parlor Ensemble "It just works. Seamlessly." (YouTube video uploaded by all about Steve Jobs.com) "Search and Destroy" - Peaches "Search and Destroy" - Iggy and the Stooges Brazil (film) Spartacus (film) "Crystal Blue Persuasion" - Tommy James and the Shondells "The Internet" (episode of the TV series Computer Chronicle) freesound.org