re:verb

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin – briefly rebranded as Kenneth Jerke and Mikhail Shocktin, co-hosts of "Shock Docs" –  explore the state of rhetorical manipulation in the context of the second Trump presidency. We discuss the general ineptitude of the conservative movement occupying the White House and the unsettling lack of a powerful counter-rhetoric in the Democratic opposition, before turning to analyze Trump's tariff policy. We discuss how the tariff conversation is a particularly baffling current example in which raw power seems to be operating without legitimation through traditional rhetorical norms.

Applying a Critical Discourse Studies lens to understand this moment, we revisit concepts like dialogicality from Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining how discourse can be evaluated based on whether it opens up difference (ie. to what extent it is dialogical) or suppresses difference. We introduce assumptions analysis from Norman Fairclough, which examines what a writer/speaker takes for granted as truth (existential, propositional, and values assumptions) and assumptions can reduce dialogical space for manipulative purposes. As a case study, we analyze an article by left-punching journalist Batya Ungar Sargon titled "Liberation Day puts Main Street ahead of Wall Street" (published in Commonplace). We analyze the ways that Ungar Sargon’s manipulative assumptions reframe Trump's tariffs as beneficial for the American worker by ignoring corporate interests and tax policy, misrepresenting political history, and erasing important debates over national security and border policy issues. We conclude with a reminder that it’s always better to be a Mikhail Shocktin than a Kenneth Jerke. 

Texts Analyzed in this Episode

Batya Ungar Sargon - “Liberation Day puts main street ahead of Wall Street” (published in Commonplace)

Works Referenced in this Episode

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.

Relevant Past Episodes

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 3

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 2

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 1

re:blurb - Conceptual Metaphor

re:blurb - Dialogicality

re:blurb - Ideographs

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

Episode Image Description: 

Top text: "re:verb"; Left-center image includes a picture of Critical Discourse scholar Norman Fairclough with a laser beam shooting out of his left eye towards right center image; Right-center image is offset, includes a screenshot of an article titled "Liberation Day Puts Main Street Ahead of Wall Street"; Bottom text: "Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day""

Today’s episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne’s concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man".

Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human, unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne’s intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne’s nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition.

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press.

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.

Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York University Press.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506

Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics. Utah State Press.

Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts. Univ of California Press.

Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research.

Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.

Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved’: An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17.

Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.

da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. University of Minnesota Press.

An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)

Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles’s fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly.

Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm, such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles’s own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles’s creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work.

Charles Athanasopolous’s Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink)

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Burke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14.

Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.

Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press..

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election. 

As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others. 

When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue. 

In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.

Texts Analyzed in this Episode:

Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”

National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”

David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”

Works & Concepts Cited in this 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