re:verb

On today’s episode, we’re thrilled to be joined once again by friend-of-the-show Dr. Jim Brown, Jr., Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. While Jim is mainly known to us as an expert in digital rhetorical studies, today we speak to him about his experience as outgoing president of the Camden chapter of Rutgers’ faculty union, the AAUP-AFT, amid its recent historic labor strike and contract negotiations. The Rutgers faculty strike was a massive success, earning pay increases and structural bargaining changes that will redound not only to the benefit of Rutgers’ precarious faculty but also to colleagues at peer institutions–including, perhaps, at your own university, listener!

In a wide-ranging conversation, Calvin picks Jim’s brain about the general duties of serving as a union chapter president, the events leading up to the April strike (including the university president’s threat of a legal injunction), the details of the union’s victories, the broader issue of neoliberalism in academic labor, and the challenges of forging solidarity across so many different job categories (e.g. tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track teaching faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate faculty, and graduate researchers–all across many different disciplines). Finally, Jim explains how he applied his rhetorical training to the strike and negotiations, and how the strike and negotiations continue to influence his digital rhetoric research. 

Works and Concepts Referenced in this episode:

Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Rutgers’ President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back.

DuFord, R. (2022). Solidarity in conflict: A democratic theory. Stanford University Press.

Eric Blanc on Twitter: Rutgers workers sing “Hey Holloway”

Murch, D. J. (2010). Living for the city: Migration, education, and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. UNC Press Books.

NBC News: Rutgers University reaches deal with faculty unions to end historic strike

The Progressive: The Rutgers Strike is a Turning Point for Higher Ed

Rutgers Office of the President: Regarding the Faculty Unions’ Strike

Rutgers historian Dr. Donna Murch on Democracy Now!

State of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s Office: Governor Murphy Announces Framework Agreement Between Rutgers University Administration and Labor Union Representatives

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Otter.ai)

The cognitive scientists at re:verb couldn't get enough of Win Bigly, Scott Adams' bizarre treatise on persuasion in a supposedly post-fact era. After tackling the introduction in December (listen to the first installment here!), we bring you our reading and re:joinder critique the first full chapter, which discusses why ordinary people like us fail to grasp reality for what it is: a mere plaything of the mastermind behind Dilbert. From Adams' ramblings, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie unearth top-secret persuasion techniques, such as lying, making speling errors, and incorrectly citing facts.

Disclaimer: These techniques are not proven to convince anyone of anything, only to garner attention and “distort reality.” And according to Adams, manipulations of “reality” and “truth” should not be used by we ordinary folk - only Master Persuaders™ like Trump can handle their raw power. In this episode, we tackle the big question at the heart of this chapter: is it ethical to intentionally mislead an audience while trying to persuade them?

Since our December episode, Dilbert is no longer in print in any newspaper after Scott Adams referred to Black people as a "hate group" on his "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" livestream. He now posts "Dilbert Reborn" comics on Locals, a right-wing subscription site, where Dogbert et al can wax cynical on "wokeness" to their hearts' content.

Join Calvin, Alex, and Sophie in their Chipmunks-inspired squeakquel to Win Bigly, because a mere sequel wouldn't do it justice.

An accessible transcript of this episode can be accessed here

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Fearing an explosion, emergency crews conducted a controlled burn of several of the cars, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and forcing the evacuation of local residents. In the ensuing weeks, pictures and videos were shared across social media of dead fish in local waterways and other sick animals throughout the region, followed by official reports of soil, air, and water contamination posing health risks to wildlife and human beings. In spite of conflicting safety information coming from the EPA, Norfolk Southern, and other government officials, residents have continued to express concerns over the long-term environmental and health consequences for Eastern Ohio.

On today’s show, we explore the perspectives of East Palestine residents with our co-host, co-producer (and reporter!) Sophie Wodzak, who traveled to the area and interviewed local residents in the aftermath of the derailment. Her co-authored article in the New York Times explores conflicts between East Palestine residents and the local, state, and federal officials who shaped its mainstream media narrative in the wake of the disaster.

Joining us in this conversation is Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, whose research focuses on the ways that rural communities organize to self-advocate on issues of environmental justice. Together, we explore the importance of legitimizing the local residents’ situated knowledge - a type of knowledge grounded in a person’s direct experience of an issue’s consequences - in environmental policy conversations and media framing.

Sophie’s co-authored article in the New York Times: “Federal Officials Send Help After Ohio Derailment, but Residents’ Frustrations Persist”

Dr. Erin Brock Carlson’s relevant research on situated knowledge and environmental organizing:

Carlson, E. B., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Legitimizing situated knowledge in rural communities through storytelling around gas pipelines and environmental risk. Technical Communication, 68(4), 40-55.

Caretta, M. A., & Carlson, E. B. (2023). Coercion via eminent domain and legal fees: The acceptance of gas extraction in West Virginia. Environmental Justice, 16(1), 36-42.

Carlson, E. B., & Gouge, C. (2021). Rural health and contextualizing data. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 41-49.

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

Trigger warning: if you are offended by evidence-based arguments against moral panics surrounding higher education, listen with discretion!

Light kidding aside, this episode addresses a very serious issue: restrictions on free speech in higher education. And no, we’re not talking about the exaggerated culture war invocations: “angry mobs” of “coddled students” yelling about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to shut down speakers they don’t like. Rather, we’re talking about real, top-down legislative attempts to restrict free speech on college campuses, such as Florida’s HB 999 bill – and the long-running rhetorical strategies and tropes that have reappeared in the language of anti-speech laws like Florida’s. 

On today’s show, Alex speaks with Dr. Brad Vivian, Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences, and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University, about his new book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. We work to rhetorically dissect some of the most common campus culture war tropes that developed over the 2010s, such as the rallying cries for increased “viewpoint diversity” (read: more speakers with bigoted, discredited, or easily discreditable viewpoints), the pseudoscientific myth of the “coddled” student popularized by writers such as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt, and the incessant fear-mongering over the so-called “indoctrination campaign” of Critical Race Theory. In examining the rhetorical history of these tropes, we chart their strange evolution from somewhat disingenuous calls for “more speech” in higher education spaces to our current moment: in which 44 states (so far) have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of a number of subjects ranging from Gender Studies to “Critical Theory.”

Why have these ostensibly pro-free speech arguments redounded to authoritarian attempts to crack down on academic freedom, and how might speech restrictions in US higher education serve as a kind of “trial balloon” for further governmental restrictions in the broader public sphere? As we grapple with these questions, we consider how colleges and universities might recommit to a more just and genuine vision of intellectual freedom.

Dr. Brad Vivian’s book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education is available now from Oxford University Press

Draft text of Florida’s HB 999

Was your favorite film approved by Uncle Sam? And just how much of your streaming watchlist did the CIA curate? On today’s episode, Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Roger Stahl, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, to discuss the widespread problem of US information operations in the motion picture industry–including, most recently, the 2022 box office smash Top Gun: Maverick. 

Thanks to Roger’s research team on his recent documentary Theaters of War (2022), we now know much more about the curious scripting and production relationships between entertainment studios and the US security state than we did until very recently. Their work has uncovered thousands of screen properties whose content was directly altered to serve US propaganda goals – as well as many hundreds of shows and movies that never saw the light of day due to lack of official support. 

So, with Roger’s help, we analyze the recent history of major military- and intelligence-approved cinema and TV hits, working our way backwards from Maverick to the original Top Gun (1986), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Rules of Engagement (2000), and even – huh??? – the comedy Meet the Parents (2000), among others. We also discuss the recent Amazon streaming success Jack Ryan (2018-present) and how its second season manufactured consent in real time for US coup-mongering in Venezuela. 

As we work through these examples, we also consider the overarching rhetorical ideologies in the military documents Roger’s research team has been studying: from the military’s curious appeals to the value of “accuracy” to patterns in types of content they deem to be “showstoppers” (leading to withdrawal of official support). We also ask whether this gigantic domestic influence operation can be properly termed “information warfare,” and what kinds of policy changes are needed to address it. For example, should there be a disclaimer included with trailers and posters for movies co-produced by the US military? Or, more radically, should these aspects of military policy be simply abolished?

We hope you enjoy our deep-dive into an extremely fascinating and timely topic with a rhetorical studies expert doing valuable investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. If you have a Kanopy subscription, check out Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary Theaters of War to learn much, much more. 

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode

Jenkins, T. (2016). The CIA in Hollywood: How the agency shapes film and television. University of Texas Press.

Tom Secker’s investigative journalism website Spy Culture.

Stahl, R. (2022, May 30). Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?. LA Times. 

Stahl, R. (2009). Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. Routledge.

Stahl, R. (2022). Theaters of War. Media Education Foundation. Available on Kanopy. 

Stahl, R. (2018). Through the crosshairs: War, visual culture, and the weaponized gaze. Rutgers University Press.

Stahl, R. (2016). Weaponizing speech. Quarterly journal of speech, 102(4), 376-395.

Are you winning bigly? 

No? 

Neither is Scott Adams, the infamous cartoonist, blogger, and self-proclaimed “expert predictor”, whose formerly ubiquitous comic strip Dilbert was recently pulled from national syndication. In September, Dilbert featured “anti-woke” content caricaturing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the corporate world, and it was promptly “cancelled” by Lee Enterprises, owner of about 100 newspapers that had formerly carried the strip. Nevertheless, back in 2017, Adams claimed to be an expert on the subject of winning–as well as communication and “political reality”–in his book / political manifesto Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams famously predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election, and he grounds most of the book’s arguments in the ostensible ethos he has garnered from this single successful prediction.

Win Bigly is the subject of our latest re:joinder episode, in which Alex reads some of its most head-scratching passages for Sophie and Calvin, and all three co-hosts learn far less than they expected to about what makes Donald Trump a “master persuader.” We do our best to make sense of Adams’ arguments before picking apart their most spurious assumptions: Adams’ questionable narrative of the 2016 election, his bizarre heuristic / coding scheme for “persuaders” (from “weapons-grade”, to “cognitive scientist”, down to “commercial grade”... ?), as well as his overall epistemology and ethics, featuring the claims that Trump’s victory “blew a hole in the fabric of reality,” and that this is a good thing -- not politically, but because it proved Scott Adams right. All told, Adams draws on his questionable credentials as a business person, communication expert, and philosopher to provide one of the most bizarre analyses of Donald Trump’s rhetoric ever written. 

This is (probably) part one in a series, since we were only able to get through the introduction. Please join us for future installments! As cognitive scientists – rather than weapons-grade persuaders – we need all the support we can get.

Works and Concepts Referenced

Beasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 13(1), 7-35.

Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1-14.

Our re:blurb ep on rhetorical situation. 

Hume, D. (2003). A treatise of human nature. Courier Corporation.

Hume, D. (2016). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy (pp. 191-284). Routledge.

Tulis, J. K. (1987). The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton University Press.

Our re:blurb episode on Dialogicality (featuring Clint Eastwood’s “Empty Chair Obama” speech)

“A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat,” proclaims Slate. The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, rhetorically: “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” And the New York Times warns: “A.I. is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” Judging by media coverage of A.I. writing algorithms, you would think they’re on the verge of becoming the easiest and most effective cheating option for writing students. But is the situation really that simple? 

To help us answer this question, we’re joined on the show this week by Dr. S. Scott Graham, associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Scott 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. Most recently, he published an Inside Higher Ed piece about A.I. and college student writing entitled “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About.” 

In our wide-ranging conversation, Scott explains why he describes himself as a “A.I. cautiously optimistic” despite the many well-documented problems with A.I. in areas such as policing and healthcare. He also helps us understand the limits of A.I. as a cheating tool as well as its affordances for teaching genre in college writing. We go on to discuss some potentially concerning non-academic applications of algorithmic writing, before concluding that (as with A.I. policing and healthcare), the problems we might attribute to A.I. tend to be better understood as problems endemic to our structurally unequal society. Scott also points out that writing algorithms are certain to create conflicts between different people’s (and disciplines’) ideas about language and “authentic” subjectivity, and that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in helping people outside our discipline understand why we tend to express skepticism at notions of “authenticity” in writing.

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Scott’s great article in Inside Higher Ed: “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About”

Graham, S. S. (2015). The politics of pain medicine. In The Politics of Pain Medicine. University of Chicago Press.

Graham, S. S. (2020). Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. The Ohio State University Press.

Graham, S. S. (2022). The Doctor and the Algorithm: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Health AI.

For this year’s Halloween special, we wanted to take a journey through the filmography of one of our favorite film directors, Jordan Peele. From the breakout success of his 2017 thriller Get Out, to 2019’s creepy and horrifying tour-de-force Us, to this year’s action-packed monster movie Nope, Jordan Peele is becoming arguably one of the most important American directors working today. His films not only bend and play with the ostensible genre conventions he works within, they also deliver substantial, semiotically rich critiques of racial politics, class struggle, and media in American society and culture. Not to mention, his films are just immensely entertaining - equal parts deeply cerebral, outrageously funny, and heart-stoppingly terrifying.

To help us discuss this topic, we’re very excited to be joined by Dr. andré m. carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.

We use concepts from Dr. carrington’s (and other scholars’) work to discuss all three of Peele’s films, charting the salience of “paraspaces” and “Otherhoods” in each as spaces where speculative imaginaries of trauma and alterity can become bone-chillingly real (such as “the sunken place” in Get Out, or the subterranean tunnel dwellings of the tethered in Us). In addition, we cover the various ways Peele incorporates “fanservice” into his films, tipping a cap to fans of horror and sci-fi and providing moments of cathartic release amidst the deluge of dread, and playing with the various conventions of speculative fiction genres to create unique and cerebral insights against a tableau of terror.

Follow Dr. andré m. carrington on Twitter, find links to more of his work on his UC-Riverside faculty profile, and check out his book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction.

Be sure to follow UC-Riverside’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar (which Dr. carrington is participating in this year), entitled “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.”

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Dash, J., & Baker, H. A. (1992). Not without my daughters. Transition, (57), 150-166.

Delany, S. R. (2012). Shorter views: Queer thoughts & the politics of the paraliterary. Wesleyan University Press.

Tananarive Due’s course on The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black Horror

Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. U of Minnesota Press.

Lavender, I. (2011). Race in American science fiction. Indiana University Press.

We at re:verb can neither confirm nor deny whether the truth will set you free - but it certainly provides good fodder for rhetorical criticism! On today’s show, Alex and Calvin present a re:joinder episode with a unique rhetorical artifact: an “unclassified” podcast recently released by one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The first episode of The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast features hosts “Dee” and “Walter” interviewing current CIA Director Bill Burns about the history and current state of the agency, in their own words. But, of course, there’s more to it than that! We examine this podcast as a rhetorical genre with a specific social action in mind: gaining the assent and trust of the center-left-aligned American public, and recruiting educated liberals to work for the agency.

From their straight-out-of-true-crime theme music to the hosts’ vocal performances echoing the likes of Sarah Koenig and Roman Mars, we note the eerie formal parallels between The Langley Files and some of the most popular informative/investigative podcasts currently running. In addition, we talk about some of the new (and some old) propaganda tropes that the CIA uses to describe its work, from its essentially “apolitical” function, “working in secrecy to protect the American people”, “organizing assets to do hard work in hard places,” all the way to the now-vaunted “competition” amongst “great powers” (a.k.a. the U.S. and China). We also critique and contexualize the strange virtue-signaling at play in how the CIA describes two of its recent “successes”: their prediction that Russia was going to invade Ukraine earlier this year, and their targeted assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

What emerges from our analysis is a clearer picture of why the CIA might produce a podcast like this. For one, they outline a need to recuperate the agency’s image in the face of what they call “a short supply” of “trust in institutions” from the American public. But more troublingly, we theorize that this podcast is designed as an avenue for humanizing the labor of the people who work in the agency, and as a way of recruiting educated liberals who face slim job prospects and harbor revulsion for the reactionary, anti-“deep state” American right-wing.

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

CIA's own journal on what the Intelligence Community means by "customers"

"Humans of CIA" Recruiting Video

Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi's thread on the US role in propping up recently elected far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni

Lee, M. A. (2001, 1 May). The CIA’s worst-kept secret: Newly declassified files confirm United States collaboration with nazis. Foreign Policy in Focus.

Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(2), 144-173.

New Yorker report on CIA's targeting of military-age males in Pakistan for drone strikes.

Rosenberg, C. (2019). What the CIA’s torture program looked like to the tortured. The New York Times.

Weiner, T. (2008). Legacy of ashes: The history of the CIA. Anchor.

Wikipedia article for “Limited Hangout”

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here

What’s a tenant union, and why does it matter? On today’s show, Alex and Calvin get some fascinating answers to this question from Luke Melonakos-Harrison, a Masters student in Yale University’s Divinity School, tenant union organizer with the Connecticut Tenants Union and the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, and aspiring Methodist pastor. 

In the course of our conversation, we learn about the kinds of unresolved housing issues, often exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, that led Luke and other tenants to begin organizing. We discuss these issues’ intersectional dimensions: how they most severely affect individuals marginalized by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status, as well as how housing issues intersect with other political problems such as the prison-industrial complex and gender-based violence and discrimination. A crucial concept Luke introduces to us is “the cult of property values,” which captures how landlords, real estate developers, and dominant media and political classes attach almost religious significance to the value of property, while neglecting other, competing sets of values like human rights and economic justice. Along with these stinging critiques, Luke shares some amazing gains that he and his fellow organizers have been able to make at a local policy level in Connecticut, and explains some of their inside-outside strategies in response to the quirks of state law. 

We close by seeking Luke’s tips for anyone listening who may be interested in forming a tenant union of their own. Luke’s main suggestion is rather simple, but inspiring: get to know your neighbors! It’s a welcome reminder – and the whole conversation is a bit of a salve – in a time when it’s quite easy to surrender to alienation and despair. We hope you enjoy it!

Follow Luke, the CT Tenants Union, and Connecticut DSA on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/l_melo_h

https://twitter.com/cttenantsunion

https://twitter.com/centralctdsa

News coverage of recent tenant organizing efforts in Connecticut:

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/tenants_union_bill_heads_to_full_board_of_alders

https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/Mayor-No-excuse-for-conditions-at-17361141.php

https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/A-week-after-hearing-cries-for-help-from-17370301.php

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/quinnipiac_gardens_tenant_union_

https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-30/new-haven-could-be-among-the-first-in-ct-to-recognize-tenant-unions-under-local-law