Constitutive Discourse of Turkish Nationalism: Atatürk's Nutuk and the Rhetorical Construction of the “Turkish People”

This article explores the “Great Speech” Nutuk, delivered in 1927 by Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In analyzing Nutuk and its rhetorical features, we identify the mythic underpinnings Atatürk employed to construct a modern “Turkish people.” We use this case to further our understanding of the constitutive discourses of nationalism. We believe Atatürk's Nutuk provides a profitable discourse to think with as we attempt to understand Muslim nations and their negotiation of modernity.     

The SANU Memorandum: Intellectual Authority and the Constitution of an Exclusive Serbian “People”

Through this essay, I assert that the intellectual authority of prominent cultural intellectuals can affect a form of “cultural pedagogy” that can essentially re-educate an audience through constitutive discourses that can re-articulate that audience's identity, cultural framework, and historical references, and in so doing can normalize mass violence. Serbian intellectuals and cultural elites played a prominent role in initializing the extreme nationalist mindset that increasingly polarized Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) drafted a Memorandum, the publication of which in the Serbian newspaper Vjecernje Novosti is retrospectively the precipitating event that awakened Serbian national consciousness. This essay critiques the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences with regard to its role in constructing an exclusive and politically charged Serbian identity. Beginning with an examination of the Memorandum's central claims, this essay asserts that the dominant mythic themes that emerge in the document were part of a deliberate teleological reordering of historical events that provided the foundation for the constitutive rhetoric of Serbian intellectuals-turned-politicians. This essay allows for a deeper understanding of the effects of constitutive discourses, rooted in a mythos of victimization, on the emergent nationalism and mass violence in the former Yugoslavia.     

(In)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of “Octomom”

This article interrogates public discourse surrounding the Suleman octuplet birth, tracing related rhetorics of pathology and risk that marked Nadya Suleman as a threat to be contained while masking dominant logics of race, class, and family formation through the ethos of medical expertise. This study demonstrates how the rhetoric of risk functions as a powerful mode of governance, policing the borders of maternity and asserting the primacy of medical authority in maintaining these borders.     

An other‐burkean frame: Rhetorical criticism and the call of the other

This essay extends the work of Murray (1998), which used the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to critique the rhetorical theory and critical methods of Kenneth Burke. This essay evaluates that critique by analyzing Nazi propaganda and Senator Edward Kennedy's “Chappiquiddick” speech through the critical lens of a revised Burkean frame. These analyses demonstrate that an Other‐Burkean frame can supplement existing resources for rhetorical criticism and contribute to a richer understanding of human communication.     

“Seeking Information from the Lips of People”: oral history in the archives of Qatar and the Gulf region

The turn to oral history in Qatar and the Arabian (also known as Persian) Gulf is not a rejection of traditional archival authority as has been the case in other parts of the world. In the Gulf, oral history has been embraced out of a desire to fill the silences of the largely unwritten record attributable to previous low levels of literacy and strong oral traditions in the region. Today, oral history is seen as the best method to capture details about traditional ways of life during the pre-oil era. After discussing archival concerns about the evidentiary nature of oral histories, this paper explores how it has come to be a crucial documentation tool in the Gulf, adapted to the specific nation building and cultural heritage priorities of the region.     

“News with an Accent”: Hispanic Television and the Re-negotiation of US Latino Speech

Using Bourdieu's concept of “linguistic capital” as an analytical concept, I examine the value of language as both a means of comprehension and a product that has currency in the television marketplace. Focusing on Fusion, an upstart cable network designed to engage Latinos civically and in English, I examine the ways in which television networks employ language as a device through which to create audiences. I argue that Fusion and other networks are attempting to re-constitute the Latino audience in ways that more closely align with the dominant culture, leading to forms of erasure that challenge the legitimacy of Spanish altogether. I further argue that in the process of pursuing the acculturated Latino, the network pivots away from those most isolated from civic discourses.     

The Attractiveness of Magazines as “Open” and “Closed” Texts: Values of Women's Magazines and Their Readers

This study examines the widespread notion that people turn to media to find reinforcement for their personal values. Based on a representative sample of subscribers to women's magazines, the article investigates relationships between readers’ own values and the values they ascribe to the magazine. For some titles, selective exposure to a periodical that presents values close to their readers is observed. For others, readers disagree on magazine values to an extent that indicates considerable room for interpretation of a magazine as an “open” text. Some women's magazines seem to allow their readers to project their own values onto the published contents rather than presenting a clear-cut, “objective” value pattern that could steer exposure.     

Information Provision and the Carceral State: Race and Reference beyond the Idea of the “Underserved”

This article addresses an approach to library services for people who are incarcerated that meets the situated information needs and desires of people within jails and prisons. By creating a flow of information between LIS students and individuals who are incarcerated through a Reference by Mail program, resources available to incarcerated people are increased while students engage in a humanizing and self-reflexive project, with the understanding that the regulation of information within jails and prisons has lasting effects for the life chances of incarcerated people.     

“Sleeping Beauty Gets a Makeover”: Using the Retelling of Fairytales to Create an Awareness of Hegemonic Norms and the Social Construction of Value

Courses: Any course that addresses gender, ability, identity, self-image, and power (e.g., gender communication, the introductory communication course, and interpersonal communication).     

“Open-Mouth Awe”: ESPN's Streetball and the “Transcendent Simultaneity” of the Media Sublime

An impressive body of research on the subject suggests that the seeds of the sublime experience are rooted either in the aesthetic qualities of the viewed object or in the cultural and contextual characteristics of the viewing subject. In this article, I contend that sublimity is, rather, the product of the relationship between subject and object, a relationship that defies representation and therefore provides the “excess of experience” that is the hallmark of the sublime encounter. Turning to ESPN's Streetball: The AND 1 Mix Tape Tour as evidence, I conclude that mediation as a process invites sublimity in audiences by immersing the viewer in the “transcendent simultaneity” of subjectivity and objectivity.     

Expert critics: operationalizing the judgement/decisionmaking literature as a theory of “bugs” and repair strategies

Humans are well-known for being adept at using their intuition and expertise in many situations. However, in some settings even human experts are susceptible to errors in judgement, and a failure to recognize the limits of knowledge. This happens often especially in semi-structured situtations, where multi-disciplinary expertise is required, or when uncertainty is a factor. At these times our natural ability to recognize and correct errors fails us, since we have faith in our reasoning. One way to deal with such problems is to have a computerized “critic” to assist in the process. This article introduces the concept of automated critics that collaborate with human experts to help improve their problem solving performance. A critic is a narrowly focused program that uses a knowledge base to help it recognize (1) what types of human error have occurred, and (2) what kinds of criticism strategies could help the user prevent or eliminate those errors. In discussing the “errors” half of this knowledge base, there is a difference between the expert's knowledge and his or her judgement. The focus in this article is more on judgement than on knowledge but both are addressed.To build automated critics it is important to understand the use and behavior of human critics. For this reason critic theory, principles and rules for design are described in this article. These are presented by showing various types of criticism encountered across a variety of generic tasks, such as medical diagnosis, coaching forecasting and authoring among many others. Thus a model of expert cognition and rules for identifying cognitive biases are presented. This rule base exploits four decades of literature on the psychology of judgement and decisionmaking as a generative theory of “bugs” in expert intuition and as a deep knowledge from which rules about buggy behavior are drawn. For the commonly recurring expert errors, specific preventive and corrective strategies are also reviewed and considerations for criticism presentation and deployment are explained. Particular attention is given to rules about when and how criticism should be offered. By consulting and attempting to operationalize the judgement and decisionmaking literature within the critiquing approach, this establishes criticism-based problem solving as a novel way to bridge the gap between the traditional domain knowledge-rich approaches of AI and the domain-independent, theory-rich approaches of decision analysis. Attention is also devoted to the obstacles to, and opportunities for, further bridging this gap.     

Catalog Users “In the Wild”: The Potential of an Ethnographic Approach to Studies of Library Catalogs and Their Users

An increasing number of library user studies are employing ethnographic techniques as an alternative to more traditional qualitative methods such as surveys. Such techniques, however, are only beginning to see significant application to catalog user studies. Beginning with a discussion of the applied ethnographic method and its current usage within the field of Library and Information Science research, this article will assess methods that have traditionally been applied to studies of catalog users and present the case for the potential of an ethnographic approach for future catalog evaluation and design.     

“The eye in the sky doesn’t lie”: Video replay and self-evaluations as part of the basic communication course

This study explores extent and frequency of conventional practices in the basic communication course: speeches, video replay, and self-evaluations from 45 basic course directors and instructors. Results indicated three to four speeches per curriculum, with two prominent speech types: informative (97.8%) and persuasive (91.1%). Approximately 76% of curriculums used video replay. Self-evaluation questions (N?=?254) used 52.8% open, 40.6% closed, 21.9% circular, and 21.9% strategic questions. Most frequently used questions focused on: delivery (12.1%), content (10.6%), or delivery and content (11.1%). Findings suggest pedagogical practices vary across the discipline, and the discussion offers practical applications for improving practices.     

Understanding the “Heroes” and “It Getters”: Fandom and the Colbert Nation

The Colbert Report, an innovative American satirical news show, and the show's dedicated viewers, known as “the Colbert Nation,” redefined fan engagement through audience participation, mediated culture jamming, and ironic political spectacle. Yet very little is known about this fan group. This survey of The Colbert Report's devoted followers finds that the fans are distrustful of political and media elites, highly cynical, very politically involved, not apathetic, and moderately efficacious. Further analysis reveals that viewers have different motivations, some seeing the show as primarily entertainment, some mainly as a trusted source of political information, and others as a mix of entertainment and information. The fans are also found to be highly sophisticated consumers of satire and news, and watch the show as an alternative to mainstream media and as a form of comic relief from current events. Several implications are discussed.     

Beyond the “Like”: How People Respond to Negative Posts on Facebook

New features of social network platforms afford users the ability to navigate potentially sensitive situations in ways they could not before. This study surveyed 260 Facebook users to uncover how people are using this social media platform’s new “reaction” buttons to respond to others’ posts about negative topics such as traumatic life situations, catastrophic current or past events, and interpersonal crises. Results suggest that users do not perceive the reaction buttons as adequate tools to help them interact with those that are close to them. Instead, these new paralinguistic digital affordances seem to help users engage in social grooming.     

Presenting “The Other Half”: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography and Magic Lantern Spectacles as the Beginning of Documentary Film

This article examines the emergence of the visual documentary genre through the study of Jacob A. Riis's magic lantern spectacles, writings, photographs, audience reception, and critical reviews as published in the press during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To demonstrate an existing strong connection between Riis's lectures and documentary film, in particular, the article also focuses on a more contemporary idea about documenting society—the concept of documentary modes of representation. The analysis of related primary and secondary sources reveals that despite the limitations of technology, “moving” documentary pictures were produced long before they were part of the film genre, and Riis's work should be viewed as one of the principal antecedents to this visual documentary form.     

“Born This Way”: Queer Vernacular and the Politics of Origins

This essay critically examines debates about the supposed inborn nature of sexual orientation. Although popular discourses suggest that sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic, several scholars and activists have argued there is danger in postulating same-sex desire is innate. This analysis looks to another feature of the controversy, arguing that when queers themselves utilize “born this way” rhetoric, they frequently do so in surprising ways that rest outside dichotomist forms of reasoning. Exploring posts on the “Born This Way” blog, this essay argues that vernacular appropriations of the phrase are more fluid among LGBT publics than often imagined, allowing for a rethinking of the epistemology of the closet.     

“People in Hell Want Slurpees”: The Redefinition of the Zombie Genre through the Salvific Portrayal of Family on AMC's The Walking Dead

AMC's popular, post-apocalyptic show The Walking Dead follows a clan of survivors as they endure the zombie apocalypse while struggling to maintain their humanity. The characters pursue temporal salvation through four social institutions: family, government, religion, and science/medicine, identified by a preliminary soak. Through content analysis of dialogueic, visual, and nonverbal references to these institutions across seasons 1–3 (N = 35), we find that each respective season proposed, and then rejected to some extent, the redemptive roles of science, religion, and the state—mirroring actual contemporary distrust. Simultaneously, through persistent, underlying storylines, the show reveals a traditional understanding of the centrality of familial relationships to maintaining a liberal society's survival—which we argue redefines the zombie genre away from its leftist roots.