re:verb

Since our last re:verb episode, the US House and Senate certified Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, paving the way for Biden’s inauguration -- but not before a large crowd of disgruntled Trump supporters descended on the US Capitol building, in a violent conflict that left five people dead and many wounded. Days later, President Trump’s Twitter account had been banned and he was impeached by the House, making him history’s first multiply-deplatformed, multiply-impeached president.

On today’s show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie react to the events of January 6th and their aftermath. We debate to what extent it is accurate and politically useful to call the 1/6 violence a “coup” or an act of “terrorism,” as well as whether our choices of modifiers to describe the event (such as “right-wing”, “GOP”, and/or “fascist”) are even more important. We also consider the apparent hamfistedness of the attackers’ planning and goofiness of their presentation, and how these elements relate to the long legacy of white supremacist rhetoric in the US.

Lastly, we discuss Twitter’s decision to apply its term of service prohibiting “Glorification of Violence” to President Trump’s account, ostensibly banning him from the platform for life. Is this an issue of free speech, propaganda, tech-sector labor organizing, hypermediated capitalism, or some combination of all of these? What exactly was the role of social media in the violence that occurred on Jan 6? And if, as seems to be the case, the Internet is undeniably bad now, what broad policy approaches might make it even marginally less bad?

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software (p. 231). University of Michigan Press.

Conger, K., & Isaac, M. (2021, 12 January). Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online Revolt. The New York Times. 

Fretwell, E. (2021, 13 January). From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry. Al Jazeera.

Levy, A. (2020, 2 July). The most liberal and conservative tech companies, ranked by employees’ political donations. CNBC. 

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.

Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2), n2.

Silverman, C., & Mac, R. (2020, 3 November). Facebook Cut Traffic To Leading Liberal Pages Just Before The Election. Buzzfeed News.

Twitter. (2021, 8 January). Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump. 

Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public culture, 14(1), 49-90.

Wong, J.C. (2017, 10 February). Meet the rightwing power players lurking beneath Silicon Valley's liberal facade. The Guardian.

In December of 2005 - 4 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and just over 2 years after the U.S. launched troops to fight its “War on Terror” in Iraq - journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a bombshell report in the New York Times detailing the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens taking place at the behest of the George W. Bush administration as part of its intelligence-gathering operations. This expose was the first of many reports to emerge in the early years of the 21st century that outlined the continually expanding surveillance powers that the U.S. government and its various intelligence agencies put to use against its own citizen population, as well as against foreign governments and civilians.

That very same year, a holiday-themed children’s book titled The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition was published by mother-daughter author duo Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell. The book tells the story of a “scout elf” from the North Pole whose job is to observe children’s behavior during the Christmas season, and report back to Santa Claus whether they have been “naughty” or “nice” - thus, whether they deserve to have their Christmas wishes fulfilled.

Both of these artifacts tell a story about the growing presence and awareness of surveillance in American culture, and about our continuing acquiescence to being watched by powerful entities with mysterious motives. While the reports of journalists like Risen & Lichtblau, as well as whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, tell of a government wielding dystopian technology to spy on its citizenry, The Elf on the Shelf presents a seemingly more anodyne, innocent form of total panoptic surveillance - one that surely promises to take some stress off the backs of busy parents and teachers during the holiday season. But at what cost? What happens when we put a patently creepy, always-watching children’s toy in charge of teaching our children lessons about morality and self-discipline?

On today’s show, we explore just some of the many cultural artifacts that form the assemblage of The Elf on the Shelf as a new holiday tradition that celebrates surveillance culture. In doing so, we contextualize Elf by analyzing the forces that give rise to the tradition: from Jeremy Bentham’s & Michel Foucault’s exploration of the “panopticon,” to the ever-watching “eye of God” in Christian religious traditions, to the ravaging culture of consumer capitalism that seems to drain the genuine substance from every tradition by replacing it with a constant yearning for new products. We lay bare our trenchant critiques of Elf’s place in American holiday culture, and attempt to imagine new types of holiday traditions that focus on mutual aid, ethics of care, teaching children consequences (both good and bad) for their actions, and resisting the culture of surveillance perpetuated by both Big Brother and Big Santa.

Special thanks for research assistance on this episode to Dr. Laura Pinto, who co-authored research examining The Elf on the Shelf and surveillance in 2014, and was kind enough to correspond with us and point us to some useful background reading in preparation for this show!

Elf on the Shelf videos featured:

Inside Look at Scout Elf Training Camp

Scout Elves Take Flight for Scout Elf Return Week

The Elf on the Shelf's Night Before Christmas Song & Music Video

Works and concepts referenced:

Bentham, J., & Božovič, M. (1995). The panopticon writings. Verso Trade.

Curtis, Adam. The century of the self. London: BBC Four, 2002.

Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Hertsgaard, M. (2016). Bravehearts: Whistle blowing in the age of Snowden. Skyhorse.

Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance and the Eye of God. Studies in Christian Ethics, 27(1), 21-32.

Pinto, L. E., & Nemorim, S. (2015). Normalizing panoptic surveillance among children: ‘The Elf on the Shelf’. Our Schools/Our Selves, 24(2), 53.

Risen, J., & Lichtblau, E. (2005, December 16). Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. The New York Times, A1.

Additional reading on surveillance discourse, power, privacy, and consumerism:

Barnard-Wills, D. (2011). UK news media discourses of surveillance. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(4), 548-567.

Cohen, J. E. (2012). What privacy is for. Harv. L. Rev., 126, 1904.

Lacan, J. (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955. W. W. Norton & Company. [Describes Lacan’s concept of “the Big Other”, a useful tool for understanding surveillance power.]

Papacharissi, Z. (2010). Privacy as a luxury commodity. First Monday. [Explains how privacy is distributed unequally based on economic class.]

The inferno rages on as the re:verb team takes on more “hot texts” - arguments and opinions with questionable premises - that have emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. In this episode, we continue to examine the backlash against movements to “defund the police” via some anti-abolitionist rhetoric from the comedy podcast Chapo Trap House, which ironically echoes the Obama critique we discussed on our last show. In responding to CTH’s critiques of abolitionism, we touch on why it’s better to stay connected with organizers in your own community than Brooklyn podcasters making 6-figure salaries.

Then, Sophie leads us through a Washington Post article that tries to “have its cake and eat it, too” on the issue of whether or not Joe Biden’s White House communications team will be “more female” than Donald Trump’s. The team discusses the nuances of representation in politics, offering a critique of “bean-counting” feminism that reproduces the logics of Trumpist rhetoric (“we have the most women - folks, you’ve never seen so many women!”). Finally, Ben brings us a hack-job of pseudo-conspiracy from the pages of The Federalist. In this article, the “voice of (Tristan) Justice” brings forth the very novel and not-tired argument that regardless of whether there was actual voter fraud in the 2020 Election, it was still an unfair contest because of (*drumroll please*) ~liberal media bias~.

We hope that our re:sponses to these hot texts provide you with a bit of catharsis coming out of a very anxiety-inducing election cycle. We (like you) can’t wait for the 2024 election cycle to begin on January 21, 2021, and look forward to the hot texts that will inevitably emerge from it!

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Berger, D., Kaba, M., & Stein, D. (2017, 29 August). What abolitionists do. Jacobin Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration

Kelley, R. D. G. (2017). What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism?. Boston Review, 12.

Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press. [Original articulation of “racial capitalism”]

Kaba, M. (2020, 12 June). Yes, we mean literally abolish the police: Because reform won’t happen. The New York Times. Retrieved from: nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html

Gilmore, R. W. & Kilgore, J. (2019, 19 June). The case for abolition. The Marshall Project. Retrieved from: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition

Do you smell something burning? It must be all these Election 2020 ~Hot Texts~! Here at re:verb we try to practice "addition, not subtraction" (to quote former President Obama), so we don’t engage with "takes" anymore. As true postmodernist podcasters, we analyze texts. 

On this two-part show, Sophie, Ben, Calvin, and Alex analyze a collection of Hot Texts responding to the 2020 presidential election results. In part one, Calvin shares how presidential candidates have used the word "rhetoric" on Twitter recently, usages which we analyze as attempting to tacitly circumscribe US political ideology and stigmatize dissent. Then, Alex brings in former President Obama's critiques of the slogan "defund the police", as well as Obama's own preferred wording: "reform the police department so that everybody's being treated fairly, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there's a homeless guy, can we maybe send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?" We discuss how, just like the candidates' ideological usages of "rhetoric", Obama's hamfisted rhetorical criticism here serves a disciplinary function, both erasing the history of past failed police "reform" efforts and denouncing abolitionist organizing. 

If you liked this re:joinder, tune into next episode, when we’ll engage with more Hot Texts: on gender representation in the incoming Biden Administration vs. the outgoing Trump Administration, and purported Liberal Media "rigging" of the 2020 contest. 

Hot Texts corpus

Joe Biden on “rhetoric”

Donald Trump on “rhetoric”

Bernie Sanders on “rhetoric”

Barack Obama critiques “defund the police” slogan

References

Previous re:verb episodes:

Interview with Dr. Cameron Mozafari

Interview with Dr. Karma Chávez

re:blurb on ideographs

re:blurb on dialogicality 

Episode of our sibling podcast, The Blurst of Times, on “defund the police”

Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press. [Canonical study of the rhetoric of science.]

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.

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

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin have the distinct privilege of speaking with Dr. Karma R. Chávez, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Karma is a scholar whose work runs the gamut from border rhetorics and pandemic discourses, to coalition-building and intersectionality. We begin by discussing Karma’s 2013 book Queer Migration Politics, considering how the issues of immigration and queer liberation have intersected rhetorically, in particular as a coalitional response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Then, Karma explains her critical views on how scholars engage with embodiment, and we brainstorm new possibilities for studying the nuances and particularities of hegemonic bodies. Finally, Karma shares her experiences visiting the West Bank of Palestine, as well as her time recording interviews about the Palestine/Israel conflict for her public radio show in Madison, Wisconsin, all of which is documented in her 2019 book Palestine on the Air. We unpack how academic freedom functions as a problematic ideograph in conversations about this issue, and close by considering intersections between struggles for Palestinians’ and immigrants’ rights.

Karma Chávez publications referenced in this episode:

Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.

Chávez, K. R. (2018). The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 48(3), 242-250.

Chavez, K. R., & Ezra, M. (2019). Palestine on the Air. University of Illinois Press.

Luibheid, E., Chavez, K.R., Brown, A.J., Capo, J., Carastathis, A., & Caraves, J. (2020). Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. (1 ed.). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Additional references:

American Studies Association Resolution Endorsing BDS

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books.

Brooks, M. P., & Houck, D. W. (Eds.). (2011). The speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To tell it like it is. Univ. Press of Mississippi.

Chávez, K. R. (2015). The precariousness of homonationalism: The queer agency of terrorism in post-9/11 rhetoric. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(3), 32-58. [Discusses “Barney Frank’s role as congressman, his position as only the second openly gay person to serve in the U.S. Congress, and I offer some history of the 1990 Immigration Act and Frank’s role in both its construction and in its passing,” p. 35.]

Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press.

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

Kaplan, S. (2015). “University of Illinois censured after professor loses job over tweets critical of Israel.” Washington Post. [Discusses the academic freedom case of Steven Salaita.]

King, T. L. (2019). The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Duke University Press.

Luibhéid, E. (2002). Entry denied: Controlling sexuality at the border. U of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Vol. 2). U of Minnesota Press.

Palestinian American Research Center

Young, I. M. (1996). Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy. In Benhabib, S. (Ed.). Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, 125–143. Princeton University Press.

This episode presents another installment in our “re:read” series, in which we take short works of literature and develop them into audio dramas featuring music, sound effects, and dynamic vocal performances.

This re:read selection is an ever-timely tale of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). Taking its title from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem of the same name, Bradbury’s story tells the tale of an autonomous, mechanized house that continues to operate despite the fact that its inhabitants (and the city surrounding it), have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Obsessed with its own self-protection, the house plays out the routines of domestic American life as if nothing has changed… until the forces of nature find a way to breach its walls.

Work read for this episode:

Bradbury, R. (1950). There will come soft rains. The Martian Chronicles. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Accessible pdf version can be found here: https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf

Music sampled in this episode:

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - “Perpetuum Mobile”

Change Taq - “Trancefer"

Change Taq - “Iridescent Creeper”

Duke Ellington - “Satin Doll”

How to Disappear Completely - “Seraph 1”

All content used in this episode is either licensed under Creative Commons, or sampled under the conditions of Fair Use: namely, the use of work for noncommercial, nonprofit educational purposes. re:verb’s co-producers receive no financial profits from the works featured in our show, and its produced content has always been intended solely for public educational purposes.

On today’s show, we sit down with Dr. Britt Paris, an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, and an affiliate with the nonprofit research institute Data & Society. Dr. Paris studies how groups build, use and understand information systems according to their values, and how these systems influence evidentiary standards and policy actions.

This conversation focuses on a wide range of topics covered by scholars in critical data studies, an approach that interrogates how powerful institutions influence the ways that data is collected, stored, and used for various purposes in society. We begin by discussing Dr. Paris’s recent co-authored report for Data & Society, Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes, which historicizes the use of manipulated visual and audio evidence and explores the current uses of technologies that allow for the use of these techniques by the broader population. We also discuss her scholarly and activist work with “counter-data actions,” which encompass data-collection and presentation strategies used to challenge powerful institutions such as law enforcement and governmental administrations. We conclude with a discussion of how we as internet users should think critically about how mass data-collection and surveillance practices are incentivized for online platforms, and what we can do in order to opt out, or even *log off.*

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Britt Paris’s Website: https://www.britt-paris.net/

Britt Paris on Twitter: @drbrittparis

Bowker, G.C. (2006). Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dalton, C. & Thatcher, J. (2014) What does a critical data studies look like, and why do we care? Seven points for a critical approach to “big data.” Society & Space. Retrieved from: http://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/craig-dalton-and-jim-thatcher-what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care-seven-points-for-a-critical-approach-to-big-data/ [includes initial reference to “counter-data actions”]

Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Generative Adverserial Network (GAD) - Wikipedia

Suwajanakorn, S., Seitz, S.M., & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I [Supasorn Suwajanakorn]. (2017, Jul 11). Synthesizing Obama: Learning lip sync from audio [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/9Yq67CjDqvw

Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

On today’s show, Alex and Ben speak with Dr. Bret Vukoder about his recently defended dissertation, an investigation into the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) filmic and televisual propaganda output during the Cold War. Due to a domestic production ban, the massive archive of over 20,000 films has been relatively unknown in media scholarship, until now.

To investigate this rich but little known archive, we begin our conversation discussing a sub-genre of USIA propaganda, which Bret refers to as “thesis films” - in short, films that are explicitly about the USIA’s film-making and information-dissemination processes. We turn our attention to clips from some of these original films to examine how they use a meta-textual attention to “process” as a propaganda strategy for showcasing the “transparency” and “ethics” of the U.S.’s foreign information apparatus. In talking through these examples and others that Bret has analyzed, we critically interrogate the ways that aesthetic and stylistic elements impact the USIA’s political messages being communicated to foreign audiences. Finally, we apply some of Bret’s heuristic tools to examine an example of interventionist foreign policy propaganda from New York Times - Joanna Hausmann’s “Venezuela’s Crisis: What My Fellow Liberals Don’t Understand.”

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Resources from / about the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth

Information on the MEP’s USIA Pilot Study

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers.

Gharabaghi, H. (2018) “American mice grow big”: The Syracuse audiovisual mission in Iran and the rise of documentary diplomacy. Dissertation for New York University, Department of Cinema Studies.

Kim, H. S. (2019). Who Views Whom through Whose Lenses?: The Gazes in USIS Film Propaganda in South Korea. In The Cold War and Asian Cinemas (pp. 284-304). Routledge.

Luce, H. (1941, 17 Feb.). The American century. Life Magazine. (Digital version available at: https://news.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/luce.pdf)

Hausman, J. (2019). “What my fellow liberals don’t get about Venezuela.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/vKVakhcm5ko

Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (forthcoming). The great war at scale: New opportunities for provenance in World War I collections at the National Archives (NARA). In Provenance and Early Cinema: Preservation, Circulation, and Repurposing (P. Cherchi Usai, J. Bernardi, T. Williams, & J. Yumibe, eds.). Indiana University Press.

Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (2020). Local insights, global networked scholarship: The Media Ecology Project USIA pilot. In Nuevas aproximaciones al cine documental. Un estado de la cuestión contemporáneo (J. Campo, T. Crowder-Taraborrelli, C. Garavelli, P. Piedras, & K. Wilson, eds.). Prometeo Press.

*Watch this space!* Forthcoming special issue in the Journal of E-Media Studies, co-edited by Dr. Vukoder and Dr. Hadi Gharabaghi:

https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/issue

On today’s episode, Sophie speaks with author and artist Frank Santoro about his recently published graphic memoir, Pittsburgh. Santoro gives us a tour of how growing up in the city of Pittsburgh and experiencing its art scene from a young age influenced his unique comic style, as well as how he interprets the ascendency of comics as a form of mass pop culture. As an arts educator, he also offers his thoughts on visual literacy, the relationship between word and image in graphic works, and what we think about when we read and write comics. Santoro also gives some insights into his “musical” philosophy of art, drawing connections between the two along the lines of rhythm and timing, emotional evocativeness, and place-creation.

Find out more about Frank Santoro’s work:

Pittsburgh (Copacetic Comics; White Whale Books)

Pompeii (Copacetic Comics)

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (Film by Dash Shaw, with illustration contributions by Frank Santoro) (Trailer)

Storeyville (Copacetic Comics)

Real Fun (Photographs by Ashod Simonian, Illustrations by Frank Santoro) (Copacetic Comics)

Cold Heat (Comic series co-authored with Ben Jones) (Copacetic Comics)

This week’s episode of re:verb is presented as part of The 2020 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival, a weeklong podcast series centered on a common theme: “the digital future of rhetoric and composition.” Other featured podcasts include the Global Rhetorics Podcast, Kairoticast, Rhetorically Yours, Rhetoricity, RhetoricLee Speaking, Writing Remix Podcast, and The Big Rhetorical Podcast itself. We encourage everyone to check out these other fantastic shows and their contributions to the Carnival.

In this episode, Calvin and Alex analyze and contextualize three recent Trump Administration Executive Orders targeting information communication technology (ICT) platforms from “foreign adversary” countries (in the EO’s words). In particular, we examine the highly publicized orders banning TikTok and WeChat, both owned by Chinese tech companies. We discuss these orders as part of a broader pattern of international brinksmanship between the U.S. and China over the ownership of ICT supply chains, and the power struggle for economic dominance between the two nations more broadly.

Then, we zoom in on the practical, day-to-day consequences of these policy issues. For this part of the episode, we reached out to a source - a Chinese international student living in the U.S. - to ask what it’s like to experience both sides of the U.S.-China digital divide. To protect their anonymity, we use a text-to-speech program (approved by the source) to read aloud their responses to various questions related to these issues: how they communicate with family and friends across the globe, their views of the WeChat and TikTok bans in terms of U.S.-China relations, and their experiences navigating both top-down and bottom-up digital censorship and surveillance practices. We also discuss our source’s request to remain anonymous, and how the necessity of this choice reflects the fraught power dynamics of contemporary digital rhetoric.

Overall, these executive orders (and the first-hand accounts of someone experiencing their consequences) illustrate that values like “free expression,” especially in digital spaces, are always contingent upon who owns the technological infrastructure that facilitates their use. As scholars and teachers, we must keep in mind that not everyone experiences digital tools and platforms in the same ways. By acknowledging the economic and political realities of the digital divide, we stand on firmer ground for re:imagining what a "free world" might look like on the global Internet.

Texts analyzed in this episode

Executive Order on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain (May 15, 2019)

Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok (August 6, 2020)

Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by WeChat (August 6, 2020)

Works and concepts referenced in this episode

Bauman, R. & Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 59–88. [Discusses the role of social power in recontextualization on pp. 76-77.]

Chen, S. Y. (2014). From OMG to TMD–Internet and Pinyin acronyms in Mandarin Chinese. Language@Internet, 11(3).

China and the U.S Are Fighting a Major Battle Over Killer Robots and the Future of AI

Chinese student sorry after uproar at US 'fresh air' speech

Daiya, K. (2020, Jun. 6). The current plight of international students. Inside Higher Ed.

Egypt blocks social media websites in attempted clampdown on unrest

Hartnett, S. J. (2011). Google and the “twisted cyber spy” affair: US–Chinese communication in an age of globalization. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97(4), 411-434.

Hauser, G. A. (1998). Civil society and the principle of the public sphere. Philosophy & rhetoric, 31(1), 19-40.

ICE bans new international students enrolled in online-only classes from entering U.S.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [See also re:verb episode 14.]

Naughton, J. (2016). The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology. Journal of Cyber Policy, 1(1), 5-28.

Neil Young Sues Donald Trump Campaign Over Use of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’

NSA accused of spying on Brazilian oil company Petrobras

Oddo, J. (2018). The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.

Reeves, J. (2012). If you see something, say something: Lateral surveillance and the uses of responsibility. Surveillance & Society, 10(3/4), 235-248.

Shaheen, M. (2020, Jul. 3). Supporting international students in the time of Coronavirus: Looking beyond immigration concerns. Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

Snowden: The NSA planted backdoors in Cisco products

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