re:verb

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.

Do you consider yourself to be a rational person? If so, Scott Adams (a.k.a. “The Dilbert Guy”), has some bad news for you.

On today’s show, we attempt to surmount our various cognitive dissonances and confirmation biases to better understand “How to See Reality in a More Useful Way,” according to the third chapter of Scott Adams’s 2017 pseudo-rhetorical quasi-treatise, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. This chapter takes us headlong into Scott’s psychology, charting his journey through various “filters” he developed to help him “predict the future” at various stages in his life: among them, the “Santa Claus filter,” the “Alien Experiment filter,” and most ridiculous of all, his self-proclaimed current “Moist Robot filter.” This one has to be heard to be believed, trust us.

Among other topics covered in this chapter are Scott’s “two movie” theory of reality, and his assertion that beliefs are really just “mass delusions” that determine how we react to new events and information. As usual, this chapter uncovers yet another layer of Scott’s solipsistic nihilism toward the world and its social dynamics. It also contains a whole section on how to become a trained hypnotist. He’s a man of many talents, folks.

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Disclaimer: This episode covers sensitive issues related to suicide and self-harm. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, we recommend skipping this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis, in the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor.

On the morning of February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force service member, posted a link to his Twitch channel on Facebook, commenting: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Several hours later, around 1pm Eastern, Bushnell live-streamed himself walking toward the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. carrying a metal bottle without a lid. Bushnell recorded himself saying: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” After setting up his camera several feet away, still live-streaming, he poured the liquid from his bottle over his head, and lit himself on fire from his feet, shouting “Free Palestine,” over and over, with increasing agony. 

Bushnell’s is the second nationally documented instance of self immolation in response to the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza. In December, a protester - whom the media has refused to name - set themselves on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta while holding a Palestinian flag. 

How can we best understand these cases: as noble and heroic protests? Or irrational acts of self-harm and self-destruction? To help us think through these questions, we are joined by Dr. James Chase Sanchez, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College and eminent scholar of racism, white supremacy, and social movements. James has published two relevant books: the co-authored collection Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, and Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy, both published in 2021. He also produced the 2018 documentary film Man on Fire, which tells the story of Charles Moore, a 79-year-old minister who self-immolated in protest against racism in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. We discuss Moore’s and Bushnell’s acts in the context of the history of social movement rhetorics, and consider how to reframe current conversations away from Bushnell the individual and towards issues of collective and internationalist solidarity.

You can find more information on James’s documentary Man on Fire at this link

James’s 2021 book Salt of the Earth can be purchased at this link

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue to break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse, recapping part one of this series, demonstrating strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discussing how this kind of large-scale “mind control” is affecting contemporary foreign policy discourse in the US.

The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.

This time, to put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding US foreign policy, specifically as it relates to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza: President Joe Biden’s November 18 opinion article in the Washington Post, entitled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas.” We closely analyze how President Biden uses manipulation strategies straight out of Van Dijk to persuade WaPo-reading liberals to ignore both the US’s constant and substantial material support for Israel’s war and its own military’s history of bloody and destructive imperialism throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We also note various tactics that the president deploys to naturalize inequality and normalize bigotry, all while touting the US’s role as the “essential” peace-loving, freedom-spreading nation. 

“The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas” - Joe Biden

Link to Part One of this Series

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Azoulay, A., & Ophir, A. (2012). The one-state condition: occupation and democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford University Press.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Fifield, A. (19 March 2013). “Contractors reap $138B from Iraq war.” CNN.com. 

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]

Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press.

Schneider, T. (8 Oct 2023). “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.” The Times of Israel. 

Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

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, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.”

The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.

To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.

Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]

van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email ([email protected]), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.

On today’s show, Ben sits down with Dr. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his research at the intersections of border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American and Latinx diasporic media.

We begin by discussing Juan’s approaches to media studies and challenges in the field, then dive into his new book, Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press). Together, we reflect on the role of media representing border tunnels–underground networks of built and excavated spaces circumventing the above-ground border. As Juan notes, these tunnels are “nearly inaccessible” to the general public, so through their representation, we see media’s capacity to give meaning to “spaces and structures in excess of their real referent.” Importantly, Juan shows us how the “figure of the border tunnel” relates to the escalating efforts to violently fortify and police the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Juan helps us understand the affordances and limitations of border tunnels’ depictions in reality television, newscasts, action films, video games, and speculative design projects. We reflect on the role of popular films that appear in the book, such as the Fast and Furious franchise, video games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel, and the reality television series Border Wars in constructing what Juan calls the “racial infrastructures of the border.” This timely conversation helps us rethink our relationship with popular media and culture, drawing out the seemingly invisible role of border tunnels in shaping our understanding of the borderlands. 

Works referenced in this episode

Agudelo, E. (2008). A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales. Borderwall as Architecture.

Fojas, C. (2021). Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures of the US-Mexico Frontier. New York University Press.

Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities. New York University Press.

Howarth, D. (2016). Beautifying the Border Proposal Replaces US–Mexico Fence with Landscaping. Dezeen. 

Hernández, K. (2010). Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press. 

Knight, K. & Llamas-Rodriguez, J. Migrant Steps Project.

Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2023). Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground. University of Minnesota Press. 

Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2017). The Datalogical Drug Mule. Feminist Media Histories, 3 (3), 9-29.

Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Border. Lateral, 10 (2).

Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2022). Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border. Social Text, 40 (4), 97-123.

Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). “The Sewer Transnationalists.” One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play, 2.  

Mattern, S. (2018). Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures. The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge.

Parks, L. (2015). “Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures. Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. The MIT Press.

Patterson, C. (2020). Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. New York University Press.

An accessible transcript of this episode can be viewed here:

https://otter.ai/u/xK1Y3uUOPeEXGBnErGd6_8eszXM

Ever since its announcement in 2021, the Atlanta police training facility project known as “Cop City” has been the subject of much criticism from activists concerned with police violence and environmental justice. The proposal included razing 85 acres of forest in DeKalb County, Georgia (just South of the city of Atlanta) to build, among other things, a mock “city” in which police would conduct training exercises. In response, members of the surrounding community and beyond have engaged in swift, voluminous, and continuous protest.

But in September 2023, in a severe escalation against the protest movement, Georgia Attorney General Michael Carr indicted 61 protestors under the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. Given that this act has historically been used to charge members of organized criminal syndicates (and of recent note, Donald Trump and his campaign staff for seeking to overturn the state-level presidential election results), its use to indict political protesters as part of a criminal conspiracy is a worrisome landmark in Georgia’s prosecutorial history. More broadly, it represents a critical abrogation of speech and association freedoms, and it sets a terrifying precedent for the suppression of political movements.

On today’s show, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie dive into the actual language of the 109-page indictment document to analyze its rhetorical conflation of political protest and free association with a “criminal conspiracy.” In addition to critiquing the document’s numerous typographical errors and sloppy, imprecise prose, we assess how its language of threat-construction renders advocates of racial and environmental justice “violent anarchists,” whose expressions and practices of “mutual aid” and “solidarity” allegedly constitute illegal associations in a broader “conspiracy.” We also discuss the dark implications of this case for free speech and free association, the chilling effects the indictment could have on political movements nationwide, and some of its particular significance for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and technical communication.

You can read the full indictment document against the Defend the Atlanta Forest organizers here:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictment

You can donate to the Legal Defense Fund for Stop Cop City organizers here:

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/atllegalfund

For a full list of mutual aid funds, including payments to individual defendants, see the following LinkTree:

https://linktr.ee/weelauneearresteefundraisers

Are you a writing instructor or student who’s prepared to turn over all present and future communication practices to the magic of ChatGPT? Not so fast! On today’s show, we are joined by Dr. Emily M. Bender, Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and a pre-eminent academic critic of so-called “generative AI” technologies. Dr. Bender’s expertise involves not only how these technologies work computationally, but also how language is used in popular media to hype, normalize, and even obfuscate AI and its potential to affect our lives.

Dr. Bender’s most well-known scholarly work related to this topic is a co-authored conference paper from 2021 entitled, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” In our conversation, Emily explains why she and her co-authors chose the “stochastic parrot” metaphor – how this helps us to understand large language models and other related technologies more accurately than many competing metaphors. We go on to discuss several actual high-stakes, significant issues related to these technologies, before Dr. Bender provides a helpful index of some the most troublesome ways they are talked about in the media: synthetic text “gotcha”s, infancy metaphors, linear models of progress, inevitability framings, and many other troublesome tropes. 

We conclude with a close reading of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about using synthetic text generators in writing classrooms: “Why I’m Excited About Chat GPT” by Jenny Young. Young’s article exemplifies many of the tropes Emily discussed earlier, as well as capturing lots of strange prevailing ideas about writing pedagogy, genre, and rhetoric in general. We hope that you enjoy this podcast tour through the world of AI hype media, and we ask that you please remain non-synthetic ‘til next time – no shade to parrots! 🦜

Check out the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, hosted by Dr. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna:

Audio Podcast

Video Podcast

Works & Concepts Cited in this episode:

Baria, A. T., & Cross, K. (2021). The brain is a computer is a brain: neuroscience's internal debate and the social significance of the Computational Metaphor. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.14042.

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).

Bender, E. M., & Koller, A. (2020, July). Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data. In Proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (pp. 5185-5198).

Birhane, A., Kalluri, P., Card, D., Agnew, W., Dotan, R., & Bao, M. (2022, June). The values encoded in machine learning research. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 173-184).

Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach. Patterns, 2(2).

Doyle-Burke, D. & Smith, J. (Hosts).(2020, 8 Jul.). Episode 17: Science Fiction, Science Fact, and AI Consciousness with Beth Singler. [Audio Podcast Episode]. The Radical AI Podcast. Radical AI. 

Dubal, V. (2023). On algorithmic wage discrimination. Washington Center for Equitable Growth Working Papers Series.

Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 275-296.

Greene, D., Hoffmann, A. L., & Stark, L. (2019). Better, nicer, clearer, fairer: A critical assessment of the movement for ethical artificial intelligence and machine learning. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Li, H. (2022). Language models: past, present, and future. Communications of the ACM, 65(7), 56-63. [Provides overview and context of Claude Shannon and Andrey Markov’s work on language modeling].

McDermott, D. (1976). Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity. Acm Sigart Bulletin, (57), 4-9. [on the concept of A.I. as a “wishful mnemonic”]

Mitchell, M. (2021). Why AI is harder than we think. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12871. [More on A.I. as “wishful mnemonic”]

Quintarelli, S. (2019, 4 Nov.). Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI). Quinta’s weblog.

Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.02243.

Torres, É.P. (2023, 15 Jun.). The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. TruthDig. [Émile Torres on the background behind the TESCREAL ideologies].

An accessible transcript of this episode is available here