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.