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 Episode

Fairclough, 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:pronouns

re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs

An 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?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).

Rather, S. (2024, 25 Apr.). How is one of America's biggest spy agencies using AI? We're suing to find out. ACLU. [On the potential harms of the US NSA implementing AI into existing dragnet surveillance programs domestically & internationally]

Robins-Early, N. (2024, 3 Apr.). George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over comedian’s AI doppelganger. The Guardian.

re:verb Episode 12: re:blurb - Stasis Theory

re:verb Episode 17: re:blurb - Dialogicality

re:verb Episode 75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity (w/ Dr. S. Scott Graham)

re:verb Episode 91: Thinking Rhetorically (w/ Robin Reames) [Episode referencing the importance of following the stasis categories in public debates]

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, 2024

More information on the Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County project can be found here

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode

Handley, 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 Analyzed

Harris-Meyer comparison text:

https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXj

Walz artifacts:

https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsY

Vance artifacts:

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html

Vance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvM

Vance’s TED Talk, “America’s Forgotten Working Class”

Scholarly Works and Concepts Referenced

Kiossev, 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/10.4135/9781446217856

Kairos:

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358

Ethos:

https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethos

An 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/1802423240876331122

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803251566356426859

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803451317098074344

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1778407786302341419

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1797668724008489005

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1798060384487948536

https://x.com/POTUS/status/1803176039603957883

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode

Baumlin, 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 Episode

Edenfield, 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 program

Rhodes, 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.

References

Remembering 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 resistance

Doctor in Gaza refuses to evacuate, pleads for Israel-Hamas war to stop

Links 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 Books

Listen to our episode on Stasis Theory here

An 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 Episode

Chouliaraki, 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 products

Reuters photographer [Mohammed Salem] wins World Press Photo of the Year with poignant shot from Gaza

Transcript 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.