re:verb

Look upon these films, ye mighty, and despair!

In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome back Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University - this time, to discuss his hot-off-the-presses book, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture. In it, Kendall examines how some of the most emotionally-charged moments of 21st century U.S. public memory  - from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street to the presidential election of Donald Trump - have resonated in the biggest box office hits of popular cinema.

Within each of these conjunctures of hit movies and widely-felt cultural sentiments, Kendall incisively traces a common theme: “the rhetoric of refusal,” in which characters shout “no!” in the face of the powerful and seek societal destruction rather than reform. We discuss some of the topics and films covered in the book, from the influence of the Occupy movement on films like Snowpiercer, Cabin in the Woods, and The Purge, to Kendall’s unique reading of 2017’s Joker as a musical, to the themes of betrayal, loss, and nostalgic longing that have permeated both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and post-2016 U.S. national politics. We conclude with some thoughts on the collective, affective power of “movie magic,” as well as how nostalgia might be productively re:imagined to move our political culture forward.

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode

Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Biesecker, B. A. (2002). Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4), 393-409.

Biesecker, B.A. (2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paregoric

rhetoric. In K. R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press): pp. 212–247.

Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; or, the Formula. Essays critical and clinical, 86.

Gunn, J. (2008). Father trouble: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(1), 1-27.

Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York University Press.

LeMesurier, J. L. (2020). Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50(2), 139-151.

Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique, (31), 83-109.

Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. John Wiley & Sons.

Mitchell, W. T. (2013). Iconology: image, text, ideology. University of Chicago Press.

Muensterberg, W. (1985). De gustibus: Notes on the genetics of taste. In Visible religion: Annals of religious iconography (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill).

Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling. Duke University Press.

Spinoza, B. (2009). The Ethics (R.H.M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Original work published 1677).

Villadsen, L. (2017). “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Affect, agency, and the rhetorical trickster.” Presented at Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, Norwich, UK.

Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(3), 349-369.

Have you ever wondered why some issues are treated as private and personal, while others are self-evidently public concerns? Meanwhile, certain topics are discussed freely and openly, but only among niche subcultures: local interest groups, expert practitioners, hardcore enthusiasts, and even marginalized communities. How can we better understand these kinds of diverse audience groupings, which are so critical to the circulation of political text and talk? 

On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a deep-dive into the rhetoric of publicity and counterpublicity. In so doing, we overview the landmark public sphere theories of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as well as later feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory contributions from scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Michael Warner, and Daniel Brouwer. Finally, we highlight the importance of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony for unpacking our inherited ideas about “civil society.” To illustrate this point, we offer an analysis of a recent controversy involving Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, in which activists pursued her into a public restroom to protest her obstruction of immigration reform. Considering the incident and its broader reverberations in media discourses about privacy and civility, we argue that these ideas are contested because hegemony itself is contested. In a deeply unequal society like ours, publicity and counterpublicity are contingent upon groups' positions within hierarchies of power. 

An early draft of this episode was prepared as a submission for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on “The Trouble with Publics and Counterpublics.” That workshop unfortunately did not take place, due to the unexpected passing of workshop co-leader Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Dan Brouwer was a critical force in rhetorical studies, public sphere theory, and queer studies - a strong mentor, friend, and crucial voice across academic fields. It is in this spirit that we humbly dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr. Daniel Brouwer.

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.

Aronoff, K. (2021, 21 Sept.). Joe Manchin’s vote isn’t that mysterious. Look to the fossil fuel money. The New Republic. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163723/joe-manchin-vote-fossil-fuel

Asen, R. (2000). Seeking the “counter” in counterpublics. Communication theory, 10(4), 424-446.

Boguslaw, D. (2021, 26 Sept.). Kyrsten Sinema used the winery where she interned to fundraise with private equity. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/kyrsten-sinema-private-equity-tax-loophole/

Brouwer, D.C. (2001). ACT-ing UP in congressional hearings. In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.) Counterpublics and the State (pp. 87-110). SUNY Press.

Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.

Cloud, D.L. (2015). “Civility” as a threat to academic freedom. First Amendment Studies, 49(1), 13-17.

Davenport, C. (2021, 19 Sept.). Joe Manchin will craft the U.S. climate plan. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/climate/manchin-climate-biden.html

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.

Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 2) (J.A. Buttigieg, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. (Originally published in 1962).

Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. Univ of South Carolina Press.

Klippenstein, K. (2021, 8 Oct.). Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is literally teaching a course on fundraising. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/

Luchetta, J. (2021, Oct. 4). Activists ambush Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in public bathroom over immigration, infrastructure. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/04/sen-kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-arizona-immigration-infrastructure/5990516001/

Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication theory, 12(4), 446-468.

Treene, A. (2021, 7 Oct.). Scoop: Sanders’ Sinema spat. Axios. Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/sanders-sinema-spat-harrassment-a8c9f7a2-6579-4800-aa28-43a71fe2639b.html

Walsh, K. N. (2021, 5 Oct.). Protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom undermined their efforts. The Independent. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-protest-privacy-b1932844.html

Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books.

It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time for another thrilling and chilling re:verb Halloween Special! This year, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined on the mic by Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor and Department Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association. Dr. Calafell’s research explores the concept of monstrosity in academia, popular culture, and politics: both how marginalized and minoritized peoples are deemed “monstrous” by dominant cultural imaginaries, and how oppressed groups often reclaim monster status as a means of empowerment. In addition, Dr. Calafell’s more recent invited talks have addressed how horror films and TV in the (post-) Trump era have been influenced by monstrous policies such as child separation at the border. 

In explaining her rich and insightful readings of these diverse cultural works, Dr. Calafell helps us to understand how horror is a contested genre in which racialized, queer, and otherwise-marginalized subjects are both written out of and into our broader imaginaries -- from the underdeveloped queer possibilities of Get Out to the expansive queer utopia imagined by A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In the course of our conversation, we reference a whole slew of recent monster movies and TV (listed in full below), and we nerd out with Dr. Calafell over our shared, undying love for the multimedia work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. We hope you enjoy - Happy Halloween, everyone!

Films, TV Shows, and Music Referenced in this Episode

Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories (2014-2017)

On Cinema (2012-present)

“Monster” by Kanye West feat. Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Bon Iver

Get Out (2017)

The Curse of La Llorona (2019)

The Lords of Salem (2013)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

It (2017)

Us (2019)

C.H.U.D. (1984)

Check out the production company Luchagore at this link

Academic Citations:

Anzaldúa, G. E. (2007). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Brooks, Kinitra. Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

Calafell, B. & Fajardo, S. (2019, 6 Nov.). The curse of La Llorona. Esthesis. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Cohen, J. J. (2018). Monster culture (seven theses). In Classic Readings on Monster Theory (pp. 43-54). ARC, Amsterdam University Press.

Johnson, E. Patrick.“‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From

My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.

Keeling, Kara.“‘Ghetto Heaven’: Set It Off and the Valorization of Black Femme-Butch Sociality.” The Black

Scholar 33, no. 1 (2003): 33–46.

Levina, M., & Bui, D. M. T. (Eds.). (2013). Monster culture in the 21st century: A reader. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Peterson, L. (2011). Black monster/White corpses: Kanye’s racialized gender politics. Racialicious. Retrieved from http://www.racialicious.com/2011/01/18/black-monsterswhite-corpses-kanyes-racialized-gender-politics/

Phillips, K. R. (2005). Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture: Horror Films and American Culture. ABC-CLIO.

Zaytoun, K. D. (2015). “Now Let Us Shift” the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 40(4), 69-88.

On today’s show, we are joined once again by Dr. John Oddo, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, for a retrospective discussion of “War on Terror” rhetoric 20 years after September 11th, 2001. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and national news media have consistently used Us and Them categories of enemy- and threat-construction, drawing on a conceptual metaphor of terrorism as an act of war (as opposed to a criminal act) to justify preventative military action. There have also been some notable shifts in U.S. war rhetoric in recent years: for one thing, references to September 11th as an inciting event have become scarcer as leaders have reframed the fight against global terrorism as an end in itself. And whereas earlier in the war, media and political figures tended to conflate specific terrorist organizations and so-called “state sponsors of terrorism”, they are now more likely to advocate a “targeted” approach: opposing large-scale troop deployments while nevertheless supporting missile attacks, special forces operations, cyberwarfare, and other forms of state violence.

After John walks us through the material and social reasons for these continuities and shifts, we analyze specific examples of post-9/11 war propaganda, comparing Larry P. Goodson’s November 2001 op-ed “U.S. Troops Must Go In” with Ryan Crocker’s August 2021 “Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster.” We examine their rhetorical strategies and discuss the greater implications of how some key tropes have evolved across texts and time: framing the war as a “clash of civilizations,” using the oppression of women and children as justificatory narratives, employing euphemisms like “patience” in foreign policy strategies, and zooming in on U.S. enemies’ violence while eliding the violence done by our military and its allies.

Lastly, we turn to a discussion of the ongoing drone war in the Middle East and Africa, in which we highlight John’s new research project on media construals of drone strike victims. John concludes with a blistering critique of an enduring problem in U.S. political rhetoric: the metaphor of war deaths as “payments” for which we deserve some return, which obscures how inflicting suffering and killing is always an irrevocable moral act.

Texts Analyzed in this Episode:

Biden, J. (2021, 31 Aug.). Address to the nation on the end of the war in Afghanistan [Speech audio recording]. Transcript, video, and audio available from American Rhetoric: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/joebidenendofafghanistanwar.htm

Crocker, R. (2021, 21 Aug.). Why Biden’s lack of strategic patience led to disaster. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/us-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.html

Dowd, M. (2001, 18 Nov.). Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/opinion/liberties-cleopatra-and-osama.html

Goodson, L. P. (2001, 14 Nov.). U.S. troops must go in. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/us-troops-must-go-in.html

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1994). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. London: Vintage Books.

Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.

Goodby, J.E. & Gross, D. (2010, 22 Dec.). Strategic patience has become strategic passivity. The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strategic-patience-has-become-strategic-passivity/

Gopal, A. (2021, 6 Sept.). The other Afghan women: In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Hodges, A. (2011). The" War on terror" narrative: discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. OUP USA.

Oddo, J. (2011). War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in four US presidential addresses. Discourse & Society, 22(3), 287-314.

Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's UN Address. Michigan State University Press.

Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.

Safire, W. (1999, 3 Jan.). On language; Not so fast! The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/magazine/on-language-not-so-fast.html [Contextual analysis on the evolution of the term “strategic patience” and Strobe Talbott’s original usage]

re:blurb episode on Conceptual Metaphor

Our first episode with Dr. Oddo, in which he articulates his theory of war propaganda

The Watson Institute at Brown University’s “Costs of War” Project

It’s common to see tech journalists make proclamations about how the internet has fundamentally changed the ways that we think, interact, and most importantly, argue with one another. It’s also common to see them herald the arrival of a “new science” that promises to provide technical answers to all questions and solve all problems that come with the “disruptive” technologies that have “revolutionized” our world.

But has the internet really caused such a drastic divergence from how we operate offline? And do we really need a “new science” for studying things like argument and disagreement, especially when already-established disciplines like rhetoric, philosophy, and the conspicuously named argumentation theory have been studying these topics for millenia?

On today’s episode, we offer a re:joinder to an infamous 2019 article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singal, entitled “The New Science of How to Argue--Constructively.” In the article, Singal profiles a man who claims to have invented a “new science of disagreement” - the Swedish blogger John Nerst, a self-proclaimed polymath who cut his teeth in the “Intellectual Dark Web”-adjacent, hyper-rationalist online blogosphere. Nerst’s “new discipline,” which he calls “Erisology,” claims to have invented a series of tools to help people better navigate arguments and disagreements online. In reality, as we point out, Nerst has merely stumbled into concepts and theories that have been debated by theorists of logic and argumentation for centuries, such as stasis theory, ideographs, and “bracketing” social difference in public deliberations. The distinction, we find, is that Nerst’s and Singal’s vision of a new culture of disagreement is reliant on rationalist rules that belie an authoritarian social and political agenda. We also discuss how privileged men react when their ideas are challenged for the first time, Jesse Singal’s beleaguered Twitter mentions, and what this article truly reveals about the nature of the internet: its power to elevate bloggers to the status of credentialed, peer-reviewed academics, as long as their ideas are laundered through online op-ed columnists.

In the spirit of generosity, here is Nerst’s follow-up blog explaining & defending his ideas: “A Defense of Erisology”

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

re:blurb on Stasis Theory

re:blurb on Ideographs

Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.

Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hemington, G. (2019, 9 April). A guide for (the) perplexed philosophers: Jesse Singal and the rationalist subculture. Irrationally Speaking. https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/04/09/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-philosophers-jesse-singal-and-the-rationalist-subculture/

Mack, P. (2016). Ramus and Ramism: rhetoric and dialectic. In Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts (pp. 23-40). Routledge.

On today’s show, Ben and Calvin have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. We begin by discussing Rich’s current research on conceptions of work in Black artistic labor, and how that led him back to considering the discursive formations of a Nixon-era economic initiative/slogan known as “Black Capitalism.” We discuss Nixon’s policy efforts to revitalize Black economic citizenship as a way of pacifying radical resistance, as well as the ensuing debates among Black intellectuals over labor and capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, Rich connects this historical context to his analysis of contemporary rap artists like Oddisee, helping us to think through how aesthetic production reflects the costs and tolls of neoliberal capitalism.

Finally, we close by addressing “toothless” administrative responses to the conservative movement against Critical Race Theory (CRT). We unpack the legal studies origins of CRT as an academic field and theory, its theoretical utility, and the material connections between the conservative interests that developed “broken windows” policing and the ongoing anti-CRT campaign. We invite Rich to “get on his soapbox”, and he articulates a critique of university policies on issues such as this one that disproportionately affect students and faculty of color, including at Carnegie Mellon University.

Works and concepts cited in this episode

Joint Statement from AAUP, AHA, AACU, and Pen America re: Legislative Attacks on CRT

Ansfield, B. (2020) The Broken Windows of the Bronx: Putting the Theory in Its Place. American Quarterly, (72) 1, 103-127.

Ayo, D. (2005). How to Rent a Negro. Lawrence Hill Books.

Brimmer, A. (1969). The Economic Potential of Black Capitalism. American Economic Association.

Bell, D. (1995) Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory? 

Boggs, J. (1970). The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism. The Review of Black Political Economy, 27-35. 

Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press.

Cross, T. (1969). Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto. Atheneum Press. 

Everett, P. (2001) Erasure. Graywolf Press.

England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed’s toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Zed Books.

Rufo, C. (2021). Battle Over Critical Race Theory. Wall Street Journal. 

Speri, A. (2019, March 23). The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional "Black Identity Extremism" Movement. The Intercept. 

Wacquant, L. J. (2009). Prisons of Poverty. U of Minnesota Press.

We live in a world of unbridled technological and argumentative advancement. A.I. has learned to debate Thanksgiving-table politics against humans. People may soon be using “argument checks” as well as “grammar checks” on their smartphones. Cats and dogs have finally put aside their differences and learned to live in peace by forming a coalition against postal workers. Welcome to the future.

Whether this sounds like an irenic utopian ideal or an Orwellian dystopia to you, it is the subject of today’s episode! In the first installment of our newest re:joinder series, Disciplining Disciplinary Boundaries, we take aim at an article that feels designed to make humanists pull their hair out: Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s “The Limits of Political Debate,” published in The New Yorker. This article tells the story of Project Debater, an artificial intelligence designed to compete in political debate competitions against humans using mountains of empirical evidence and “fifty to seventy” prefabricated argument structures. As we read through the dramatic tale of P.D.’s inception  to it’s first high-profile defeat in public debate by Harish Natarajan in 2019, we discuss the way that science journalists (and scientists themselves) make strange and fascinating assumptions about the humanities.

We also frame our reading of the article with two critical pieces of rhetoric scholarship that help illuminate its various rhetorical pitfalls and spurious assumptions. Jeanne Fahnestock’s 1986 classic “Accommodating Science” lays the groundwork for studying science journalism by taxonomizing some typical rhetorical appeals and information transformations journalists use to make hard science more appealing for public audiences (e.g. sacrificing technical details at the expense of telling a dramatic narrative of “discovery”). Finally, we end with Carolyn Miller’s 2007 article “What can automation teach us about agency,” and reflect upon the ways that A.I. can only have rhetorical agency if an audience attributes it. This article helps us better understand why Project Debater suffered defeat at the hands of a human, and why this article tells us more about the limits of artificial intelligence rather than “rhetorical persuasion.”

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 330-350.

Miller, C. R. (2007). What can automation tell us about agency?. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(2), 137-157.

Plato. (2008). Gorgias (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. (Original published c. 380 BCE). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm

Slonim, N., Bilu, Y., Alzate, C., Bar-Haim, R., Bogin, B., Bonin, F., ... & Aharonov, R. (2021). An autonomous debating system. Nature, 591(7850), 379-384.

Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, Apr. 11). The limits of political debate. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-limits-of-political-debate

On today’s show, the re:verb team gets “meta” - metaPHORICAL, that is! On this re:blurb episode, we discuss the rhetorical and linguistic features of conceptual metaphors, which provide us with a way to make connections between two (often very different) processes. To put it more simply: have you ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Have you ever scolded someone for *wasting* their time, telling them that they could *spend* it doing something more *worthy*? If so, you’ve been using a very common conceptual metaphor!

Listen in as we break down a vast array of conceptual metaphors, from cultural metaphors that mediate our cognition and everyday social life to political metaphors wielded by the powerful to frame tendentious policies and practices in ways beneficial to them. As an example of the latter, we provide an analysis of the mixed political metaphor “sowing discord,” often used in the context of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric about Russia. Despite what the latter metaphor implies, we hope that this episode takes root in your mind and provides music to your ears!

Metaphor Theory References:

Chilton, P. A. (1996). Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house (Vol. 2). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. The journal of philosophy, 77(8), 453-486.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and thought, 2, 285-324.

Analysis References:

Countering Russian Disinformation. (2020, September 23). Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Holycross, Jordan & Riggio, Olivia. (2018, September 18). Morning Edition’s Think Tank Sources Lean to the Right. FAIR.org.

Johnson, Adam. (2016, October 1). NYT Exposes a Favorite Source as War Industry Flack. FAIR.org. 

Johnson, Adam. (2017, May 8). Lockheed Martin–Funded Experts Agree: South Korea Needs More Lockheed Martin Missiles. FAIR.org. 

Lipton, Eric & Williams, Brooke. (2016, August 7). How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence. The New York Times.

Shupak, Gregory. (2018, July 26). The Sanctification of NATO. FAIR.org.

Further Reading on Conceptual Metaphors:

Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5): 563-581.

Grady, J. (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes.

Grady, J., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science (Series 4), 101-124.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2013). The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture. Intercultural pragmatics, 10(2), 315-339.

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter’s box and faced off against Calvin’s Curveball, a trivia question related to their research. 

We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb’s co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb. 

We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (@reverb_cast) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!

It’s 2021, science is back in charge in America, and we’re on a clear path to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. But is it really that simple?

On today’s show, we talk with Dr. Abby Cartus, a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh, about her thoughts on pandemic rhetoric and policy in the transition from president Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Abby lays out for us the way that the new Biden administration’s technocratic rhetoric has sought to reframe debates over COVID policy as purely “technical” and “empirical,” rather than “moral” and “political.” As a result, the administration’s approach to managing the virus and keeping citizens safe has amounted to continuing investment in the vaccination deployment that began under Trump. At the same time, ordinary citizens are being told that reducing transmission is a matter of their own personal responsibility, even if they are forced to go to work in unsafe conditions. This rhetorical idiom cultivates the sense that even though scientific experts hold power, they are severely limited in what they can do, and the responsibility for controlling the pandemic rests solely in the hands of individual citizens themselves.

This controversy has recently reached a flashpoint in the debate over whether or not public schools in the U.S. can safely reopen at this stage in the pandemic. Abby leads us through the ways that *certain* scientific rhetorics - particularly claims that COVID transmission rates are lower among children and in schools - are being marshalled against teacher unions advocating for safer work environments. In fact, much of the research promoting these claims (often based on selective sample sizes and questionable data-collection practices) is funded by proponents of school privatization, such as the Walton and Gates foundations, who have an economic incentive to demonize and dismantle education workers’ collective power.

To conclude, Abby summarizes what a more humane policy strategy might look like, in the form of a “paid shutdown” - a short-term closure of nonessential businesses, supplemented by paying furloughed workers to stay home and quarantine. We sign off with a reminder that even when the status quo feels intractable in situations like this, “the way things are” should never be taken as the final word on the way things could/should be!

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Cartus, A. (2020). Education privatization advocates find an opportunity in the school reopening debate. Medium. 

Feldman, J. (2021). Coronavirus Is an Occupational Disease That Spreads at Work. Jacobin. 

Feldman, J., Cartus, A., & Prins, S. (2021). Biden’s Coronavirus Plan Will Not Prevent Death and Devastation. The Nation. 

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press. 

Prins, S., Feldman, J., & Cartus, A. (2021). Teachers and Their Unions Are Demanding Truly Safe Schools Reopening — Not “Ignoring Science.” Jacobin.