Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic

The term “democracy” is ambivalent—in the history of the United States, it has played both god term and devil term, and inspired both sacrifice and trembling. Robert L. Ivie has mapped the discourse by which American policy elites have said “no” to democracy—the rhetoric of “demophobia.” This essay complements his analysis by mapping the discourse by which Americans began to say “yes” to democracy during President Thomas Jefferson's administration—the rhetoric of “demophilia.” Understood as a discursive formation, demophilia creates space for rhetoric and deliberation that is closed by demophobia. In the process, demophilia disciplines democracy by producing deliberative subjects properly attuned to civil speech.     

Deconstitutive rhetoric: The destruction of legal personhood in the Global War on Terrorism

This essay examines a set of memoranda, speeches, and other official discourse issued during the Global War on Terrorism that transformed the legal paradigm under which the enemy was defined and authorized new norms of conduct previously prohibited by law. It argues that these texts employ “deconstitutive rhetoric,” defined as discursive action that undermines the existing legal status of those to whom it refers and produces a disarticulate, destitute subject by denying the individual access to the civic forums in which rhetorical agency may be exercised. The essay begins with an analysis of the use of deconstitutive rhetoric in the decision to legally re-define Afghanistan as a “failed state” in order to absolve the United States of treaty obligations with that nation. It then addresses the emergence of “unlawful enemy combatant status,” a new legal category not recognized under the international laws of war. The essay concludes with a discussion the Obama administration’s detention and drone strike policies, which have continued to use deconstitutive rhetoric to undermine the legal status of those captured and killed in the Global War on Terrorism.     

Beyond Orientalism in comparative education: challenging the binary opposition between Japanese and American education

This article challenges the common-sense observation that Japanese and American education have been moving in “opposite directions” in recent times. Drawing on postcolonial discourse studies and cultural studies, the article extracts from this observation an Orientalist binary epistemology that continues to set discursive limits on the way Japanese and American observers make sense of each other's education. It is argued that the predominance of this Orientalist binary paradigm in comparative discussions of Japanese and Anglo-American education has resulted in the unfortunate lack of scholarly efforts to take full account of the common global structural changes in education driven by neo-liberal and neo-conservative impulses. As a crucial step towards the critical, reflexive engagement with the continuing colonial legacy, this article proposes a structurally oriented research paradigm that enables us to discuss localised and nationalised differences in education changes within the common frame of global structural changes in economy, state and education.     

Narrative authority vs. perjured testimony: Courage,vulnerability and truth

This paper outlines a method for describing and analysing discursive practices in education. Discourse analysis exposes and clarifies the discursive practices by which and through which all aspects of education are carried out. An analysis of representative “classic” texts of radical educational theory was undertaken in order to study the discursive construction of knowledge. The case‐studies reveal a discursive operation of recontextualization,where a paradigm‐shift away from the functionalist discourse of education is effected. This operation involves “translating” the categories of “education” and “schooling” from their familiar discursive contexts to a new context where they enter into new relations with unfamiliar terms and categories. The radical education critique and the knowledge organized around and through it fall into a pattern which echoes the sermon genre of the jeremiad, which facilitates the construction of knowledge in terms of the gap between “full humanity” [Freire] or the Jeffersonian ideal [Bowles and Gintis] and the actual present state of alienation. Radical discourse in effect both constructs that gap and determines the means by which it can be closed.     

Social Justice and Education as Discursive Initiation

In this essay Krassimir Stojanov attempts first to reconstruct the “heart” of Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics, namely the so‐called “principle of universalization” of ethical norms. This principle grounds Habermas's proceduralist account of social justice via equal access of all concerned to the practices of deliberative validation of norms. Stojanov claims with regard to this account that it could only be implemented if the social actors are involved in a process of education as discursive initiation. After using R. S. Peters's educational theory to distinguish discursive initiation from a traditionalist understanding of educative initiation, he discusses some central social prerequisites for the development of discursive skills in growing individuals; to identify these prerequisites, he draws on Axel Honneth's conception of the intersubjective origins of individuals' development of rational autonomy. In the final part of the essay, Stojanov briefly explores some implications of his elaborated account of discursive initiation and its social preconditions for schooling and pedagogy.     

The liberal arts‐necessary

Edward R. Murrow's documentary series See It Now's “Report on Senator McCarthy” is a telecast that stands as one of the most influential documents in American public discourse. It is also one of the least understood. The standard response has been to label the program as “flawed” because it was not “objective.” This essay argues that the text situates itself between the genre of objective news documentary and the genre of public argument through the ironic “use” of objectivity as a fabricated strategy of appeal.     

Assessment as learning: Enhancing discourse,understanding, and achievement in innovative science curricula

An assessment‐oriented design‐based research model was applied to existing inquiry‐oriented multimedia programs in astronomy, biology, and ecology. Building on emerging situative theories of assessment, the model extends prevailing views of formative assessment for learning by embedding “discursive” formative assessment more directly into the curriculum. Three twenty‐hour curricula were designed and aligned to content standards, and three levels of assessments were developed and used to assess and enhance learning for each curriculum. These assessments included three or four informal “activity‐oriented” quizzes and discursive formative feedback rubrics supporting collective discourse, a “curriculum‐oriented” examination of individual conceptual understanding, and a “standards‐oriented” test measuring aggregated achievement of targeted standards. After two design‐research cycles, worthwhile scientific argumentation and statistically significant gains were attained for two of the three packages on the exam and test. Achievement gains were comparable to or larger than those of students in comparison classrooms. Many existing innovations could be enhanced and evaluated in this fashion; designing these strategies directly into innovations could have an even greater impact on discourse, understanding, and achievement. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1240–1270, 2012     

“We don't want your opinion”: Knowledge Construction and the Discourse of Opinion in the Equity Classroom

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: “That's just [the author]'s opinion.” This “opinion discourse” emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate their knowledge. The opinion discourse could easily be read as simply an example of the lack of critical thinking skills among students. However, we believe that opinion discourse is more than a facile response to new ideas. We want to take opinion discourse seriously. We argue that opinion functions as a discursive project of resistance in the context of the equity-oriented classroom by solidifying inequitable power relations between the knower and that which is known. Our goals are twofold: to explicate how the opinion discourse functions as a specific legitimization of existing power relations and to unsettle the discursive authority that opinion offers.     

跨文化交际中的言语合作原则和礼貌原则

本论文以中美两国为倒,指出由于在以下四个方面存在很大的不同：意识形态,面子体秉,话语形式和传统文化,因此人们在跨文化言语交际中所遵循的合作原则和礼貌原则的佣重点不同,这也就导致误解与不快,因此,在跨文化交际中,不仅要学习其他国家的文化特征,而且更应尊重其他国家的文化,这样跨文化交际才能持续和顺利地发展。     

Wanted: A speech salesman for the United States government

This essay argues that the alleged demise of a unified and coherent public in contemporary twentieth‐century American political discourse is more a symptom of how we have visually objectified “the people” than it is a newly discovered fragmentation of the “thing” itself. This claim is developed by examining the emergence of social documentary photojournalism in the 1930s and its ideological implications for American liberal‐democratic rhetorical practices. James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is treated as a representative anecdote that illustrates the problems and possibilities of the tensions between individualism and collectivism that rest at the heart of liberal democracy.     

Toward Contingent Understandings of Intersecting Identifications among Selected U.S. Interracial Couples: Integrating Interpretive and Critical Views

This essay includes selected examples of interview discourse derived from a larger study exploring how social structures and cultural identification issues of race, sex, and class are jointly negotiated in the relational accounts of black and white interracial marital partners. A dialectic of critical and interpretive perspectives is utilized to uncover complex intersecting cultural and relational identifications. The discourse shows that couples negotiate who they are in their relationships; ambivalence, contradiction, and change over time are evident. At some points, couples' negotiations reveal disassociation from the label “interracial,” and discursive forms that show both problematizing and evading race in their personal relationships and in the workplace. Overall, couples' collaborative interview discourse reveals a vigilance and protection of the partners, their relationship, and family from discrimination.     

“Verbal Ping Pong” as Culturally Congruent Communication: Maximizing African American Students' Access and Engagement as Socially Just Teaching

African American youth have been disciplined and dismissed from classrooms for engaging in culturally-based communication practices that teachers misinterpret and perceive as disruptive. Teachers have significant power in how they communicate with their students. White teachers should be especially aware of this power because misunderstandings around communication often stem from cultural differences. This study illustrates the promising practice of a white teacher who integrated African American students' culturally-based literacy practice of “verbal ping pong” into English subject matter instruction. Ethnographic methods that foreground the perspectives of student participants illuminated the significance of this highly interactive discourse, while discourse analysis showed how it functioned as culturally congruent communication to promote students' access to classroom discourse and engagement in subject matter learning. By showing how culturally congruent communication can provide equitable access to learning opportunities for all students, this study renders a promising representation of socially just pedagogy.     

“Voice” and “voicelessness” in rhetorical studies

This essay begins with the observation that the term “voice” is frequently used in rhetorical studies literature. Interestingly, rhetorical “voice” means different things to different scholars. This essay seeks to accomplish two tasks related to “voice.” First, it clarifies the conceptual confusion regarding “voice” found in the literature by relating it to a tension between “speaking” and “language.” Second, to avoid this tension, this essay presents a case study in which a notion of “voice” is posited that is constitutive of the public acknowledgment of the ethical and emotional dimensions of public discourse.     

Making Sense of Disaster Through Rhetorical Homologies: Extending Walter Benjamin’s Unique/Copy Binary to Post-Katrina Tours

Over a decade after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, publics continue to come to terms with the tragedy. Isabelle Cossart, owner of “Tours by Isabelle” and survivor of the hurricane, began offering disaster tours of the affected areas after taking note of people’s desire to see the damage and contemplate its effects. Public accounts of Cossart’s business suggest that people make sense of disasters symbolically via tourism. Cossart’s post-Katrina disaster tours belong to a wider form concerning disastrous events springing from anxiety over how to respond, followed by agency-driven strategies for coping. This discursive dichotomy of disaster/agency is grounded in a homologous discourse of uniqueness versus copy in Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Through publicly available information on “Tours by Isabelle,” this article compares subcategories of disaster, Cossart’s tours, and works of art, and explores how people make sense of disaster symbolically.     

Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.     

The rhetorical limits of the “plastic body”

This essay analyzes the “plastic body” as it is produced in the discourse of plastic surgery. The contemporary industry has constructed a popular image of plastic surgery as a readily available and personally empowering means to resolve body image issues, on the presumption that any body can become a “better” body. The ideology underlying the industry emerges out of analysis of the rhetoric of surgeons and patients. The rhetorical efforts of amputee “wannabes,” who seek elective amputation and who use arguments similar to those of mainstream plastic surgery applicants, reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in decision‐making about who has access to these procedures. The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.     

Keeping Up Appearances before the “Other”? Interculturality and Occidentalism in the Educational TV-Program “Happy Chinese”

“Happy Chinese” or kuaile hanyu is an educational melodrama produced by the Chinese TV channel CCTV in 2009. Aiming to improve foreign learners’ Chinese language skills, the plot revolves around Susan, an American, staying with her former Chinese classmate’s family. “Happy Chinese” proposes both language and cultural learning. In this paper, the authors are examining the first seven episodes marking Susan’s arrival in China for the Spring Festival. Basing the study on a postmodern and critical approach to the “intercultural,” as well as on a critical view towards Orientalism and Occidentalism, the authors are interested in how the programme constructs the arrival of the American and the way she is perceived and represented by the “locals.” The authors are also looking into what the Chinese family teaches Susan about being Chinese and, at the same time, the tensions that a certain tendency to “keep up appearances” and appear “real Chinese” before her trigger in the family, across generation and gender. The research tools used to analyze the data are derived from discursive pragmatics.     

B Is For Burqa,C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse

In this article, I add a discursive analysis to the discussion about Muslim girls and women's dress in non-Muslim educational contexts. I argue that a law or policy that prohibits the wearing of khimar, burqa, chador, niqab, hijab, or jilbab in the context of public schools is a form of censorship in educational contexts. This sartorial censorship is miseducative in the sense that it impedes the achievement of important educational goals, especially in public education. I consider the public nature of public education and discuss three sets of miseducative effects: First, the examination of discursive processes, including the production of social norms, is limited. Second, the critical uptake of the banned discourse by female Muslim students themselves is foreclosed, and their agency hindered. Third, a metadiscourse arises that translates individual sartorial discursive acts into generalized terms (such as “veils” and “headscarves”) without noticing what is lost in translation.     

Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language

In 1923 the emerging Chinese advocates for the development of science successfully launched a war against the so‐called “metaphysical ghosts,” who believed that science was inadequate to address the fundamental questions of human life. An important and far‐reaching spiritual effect of this “holy war” was to give rise to an attitude of religious zealotry toward the worship of science in China, a nation that had not yet experienced the baptism of science in the early twentieth century. This essay explores one profound source of this spiritual appeal by examining the campaign for science in the context of the Chinese tradition of Dao‐discourse and by viewing this campaign as an estimable effort to maintain this sacred form of discourse. This approach has implications for an ignored study of the rhetoric of scientific popularization in a cross‐cultural context.     

A systematic form of Japanization in Okinawa: Japanese identity construction through a Japanization discourse in textbooks and a textbook guide

This research examines some modes of Japanization through education in Okinawa where Japanese influences on education have permeated after Japan’s annexation. I investigate how a book excerpt entitled Mizu no Tōzai, included in high school textbooks in Okinawa, constructs Japanese identity. Mizu no Tōzai functions as nihonjinron discourse, which is characterized by ‘Japanese culture,’ ‘Japanese uniqueness,’ and ‘Japaneseness.’ The ‘East-West’ dichotomy, depicted in this nihonjinron discourse, induces students to choose ‘Japan’/‘Japanese culture’ and become ‘Japanese.’ Practice sections of Mizu no Tōzai in textbooks as well as a textbook guide operate to be complicit in this Japanese identity construction. Through a critical analysis of discourse, I reveal that the nihonjinron discourse operating as official knowledge, in collusion with the other discursive texts, produces a position subjected to the discourse of Japanization within which Okinawans become ‘Japanese.’ I problematize these discursive texts as a systematic form of Japanizing Okinawans’ minds through education.