Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary

This introductory essay makes the case that rhetorical studies as a field and the Quarterly Journal of Speech as the journal of record for that field are racist. Racism need not imply that evildoers in pointy hoods are pulling the strings of the journal and field; indeed, the assumption that racism is rooted in the bad thoughts and deeds of intentional individuals is part of the problem and is further evidence of the field's ignorance on the subject. Drawing inspiration and guidance from Ibram X. Kendi's work on antiracism, and anchoring my analysis in Paula Chakravartty et al.'s “#CommunicationSoWhite,” I make an honest effort to diagnose aspects of rhetoric's racism problem and suggest some of the attitudinal and material shifts that will be necessary to challenge the whiteness of rhetorical studies. An introduction of the remaining essays in this #RhetoricSoWhite forum concludes the introduction.     

The feminist civics lesson of 19: The Musical

ABSTRACT

This essay examines 19: The Musical—a memorial project that marks the suffrage centennial. The author employs an intersectional lens to examine the arguments this memorialization makes about a suffrage past as well as a feminist present and future. This intersectional emphasis is especially important given the prevalent present-day assumption of the suffrage movement as an entirely white women's endeavor—one that especially forgets the racism and exclusivity that riddled the suffrage movement.     

The vacuous rhetoric of diversity: exploring how institutional responses to national racial incidences effect faculty of color perceptions of university commitment to diversity

Abstract

Recent news cycles have illuminated the disparate, racialized experiences of Black people in the United States but university leadership responses have been reactionary, or worse non-responsive. This study examines how university responses to national racial incidences such as the police brutality affect how faculty of color in one discipline understand the university’s commitment to diversity and ultimately how it affects the faculty experience. Illuminating how university actions affect not only faculty attitudes, but also faculty work has implications on broader university diversity outcomes and rectifying the racist, colonial founding of universities as national institutions. Findings show that there was increased race-related service taxation that was paired with resiliency and resistance tactics, and self- and community-driven coalition building. There are implications for institutional leaders around increasing a diversified student body through attention to community incidences and redefining community relationships to the university.     

Counter-stories as representations of the racialized experiences of students of color in higher education and student affairs graduate preparation programs

In this paper, we employ Critical Race Theory theoretically and methodologically to examine the racialized experiences of students of color in higher education and student affairs (HESA) graduate preparation programs. We employ counter-storytelling as a method for constructing narratives that disrupt the master narrative found within HESA graduate preparation programs, which often boast an espoused commitment to diversity and social justice. Based on a study of 29 graduate students of color in 21 master’s programs across the United States, the counter-stories reflect the endemic nature of racism in graduate education including the classroom, academic program, and campus. Students expressed experiences of tokenization, disappointment, feelings of frustration, anger, and racial battle fatigue. Implications for improving racial climates in graduate education are also shared.     

The rhetorical construction of the nation in education: the case of Flanders

This paper examines what can be learnt from ‘new rhetoric’ (focusing on the work of the American rhetorician Kenneth Burke [1897–1993]) about (national) identity and discusses how nationalism can be taught from such a rhetorical perspective. Despite the ‘deconstruction’ of nation(alism) as a grand narrative, there is a new tendency towards emphasizing national identity, caused by trends such as globalization and multiculturalism. In the language and literature teaching curriculum, this paradoxical situation often causes frictions for teachers who very often are expected to teach standard language and national literature. The hypothesis is that rhetoric is a tool to deal with these tensions in the curriculum. This paper focuses on Flanders as a case‐study. Together with pre‐service teachers it analysed the rhetorical construction of Flanders from a dramatistic perspective. It is argued that Burke’s concepts are useful tools to make students ‘symbol‐wise’: to understand the way national symbols work, and to develop critical engagement with, as well as on behalf of, those symbols.     

Public universities and the neoliberal common sense: seven iconoclastic theses

Neoliberalism has utterly failed as a viable model of economic development, yet the politics of culture associated with neoliberalism is still in force, becoming the new common sense shaping the role of government and education. This ‘common sense’ has become an ideology playing a major role in constructing hegemony as moral and intellectual leadership in contemporary societies. Neoliberal globalisation, predicated on the dominance of the market over the state and on deregulatory models of governance, has deeply affected the university in the context of ‘academic capitalism’. The resulting reforms, rationalised as advancing international competitiveness, have affected public universities in four primary areas: efficiency and accountability, accreditation and universalisation, international competitiveness and privatisation. There is also growing resistance to globalisation as top-down-imposed reforms reflected in the public debates about schooling reform, curriculum and instruction, teacher training and school governance. Many question whether neoliberal reforms attempt to limit the effectiveness of universities as sites of contestation of the national and global order and thus undermine the broader goals of education. Neoliberal reforms have limited access and opportunity along class and racial lines, including limiting access to higher education through the imposition of higher tuition and reduced government support to institutions and individuals.     

Racial and ethnic diversity in schools: The case of English Canada

In recent decades, schools located in English Canada have experienced important demographic changes in their student population. This article examines the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity in these schools, through the discourses of those who spend the most time with the students: teachers and principals. Here, the concept of discourse is understood as a way of framing the world; it is far more than a simple tool for communicating with others. Since education operates under provincial and territorial jurisdiction in Canada, these discourses are examined in the context of provincial school policies that specifically address the issue of diversity among students. Using qualitative data collected in a national study completed in 2007, the analysis shows how teachers and/or principals make sense of this changed reality in their schools and its impact on their daily work.     

The seduction of common sense: how the Right has framed the debate on America's schools

Abstract

Teachers in England have always been watched; only more recently have they been surveilled, with senior leaders, peers, students and stakeholders all collecting performance data. Yet surveillance in schools and colleges increasingly relies on watching the self, with teachers voluntarily participating in their own surveillance, making their practice visible for easy consumption by interested parties. This article builds on previous work on the surveillance of teachers to argue that this ‘conspicuous practice’ represents a convergence of surveillance and consumerism, with teachers being recreated as commodities and their own marketing agent, embodying the entrepreneurial self to maximise employability. Through social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn to exploiting open plan learning spaces, teachers engage in conspicuous practice for three main reasons: from fear, to avoid sanction; as a result of acculturation into commodified environments; as a means of routine resistance, employing the dramaturgical self for personal gain, to avoid work or re-appropriate professionalism.     

西方修辞视野下权力话语策略及反思

福柯的＂权力话语理论＂是各式语篇话语分析的强有力的理论支撑。他认为,权力话语以权威性的陈述形成其真理性的论断,由此产生的约束性、感染力影响了受众的理性思维的力量和方向。话语作为一门说话的策略,如何运作以加强发话人运用语言影响受众,说服受众,这是对更为隐蔽的新型权力话语的运作方式的深度思考。     

修辞的本质与功能——兼论修辞与和谐社会的构建

本文拟从西方修辞学的角度探究构建和谐社会的途径.关于修辞学在发展和维护社会和谐方面的作用是一个值得探究的广泛而深刻的问题,它探索在建立和维护一个社会时修辞学的特殊功能,探讨人类是否依靠修辞创造和谐,达到一个理性社会所需要的在工作和生活中的协作、最终取得同一性以及共同的社会价值取向.本文将修辞置于社会结构关系和社会人际互动的背景中进行考察,分析社会心理认知、话语认知与修辞行为的动态共变关系,揭示修辞的规律与目的,探讨修辞的本质与功能.     

Colonizing the Borderlands: Shifting Circumference in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X

In the last year of his life, Malcolm X was faced with the task of crafting a viable public voice while remaining unfettered by existing ideologies. In a speech he delivered less than a week before he died, Malcolm addresses this task by repeatedly shifting the scene within which he asks his audience to define themselves. He explores the possibilities and the limitations of both the domestic and international scenes, and finally invites his audience to position themselves at the border between the two. There, he and his African‐American audience might take advantage of the redefinitional potential of international identification without abdicating their rightful domestic position.     

从现代到后现代:当代修辞学理论辨析

修辞学的当代复兴,与人们对语言、知识以及二者关系的重新思考分不开。现代修辞学重视从双向交流和整体文化建构角度,从哲学、文化学、社会学、人类学等不同学科方向上综合描述和阐释修辞现象,强调修辞的普遍性,复义性,交流性和认知性。后现代修辞理论则强调修辞作为“无中心”的“播撒”,是无法组合成有序结构的自相矛盾的表意手段,认为修辞作为能指的互设,具有“形式游戏”和“自我解构”的“转义”功能。现代修辞学与后现代修辞理论呈现出来的不同理论特色,表明了当今时代人类文化在走向全球化的同时,更强调多元化、多层化和非中心化的发展趋向。     

高等教育中的公立与私立问题--以英国为例的研究

从撒切尔夫人开始,英国就进行了广泛私有化改革,但英国的高等教育仍然由政府部门主导。最近的15年间,英国高等教育的财政制度和学校体制发生了巨大的变革,市场机制在英国高等教育中扮演了越来越重要的角色。在高等教育的结构方面,由过去主要以研究型大学为主,发展为多种类型大学并存。在政府对高等教育的管制方式方面,政府通过质量保证局与研究评估局,加强了对大学的绩效管理。在经费方面,一方面加强了绩效拨款,另一方面强调学生分担教育成本。在大学管理方面,在加强政府监督的同时,也进一步扩大了大学的自主权。这表明私营部门在英国高等教育变革中所扮演的角色越来越重要。     

The Oppressor Within: A Counterstory of Race, Repression, and Teacher Reflection

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education’s dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily because it touches on a largely unexplored dimension of teacher reflection. While the large majority of the literature has focused on how to prepare White preservice teachers to teach in a culturally and racially complex world, little qualitative attention has been given to the preparation of nonwhite students. While there are a few select and important articles that touch on some of the challenges African American students face in predominately White teacher education programs, including covert and overt racism, none focus on how teacher reflection might reproduce these dynamics. Thus what the literature on teacher reflection often suggests is that it is a racially neutral practice. In this essay, however, I suggests otherwise, by providing an intimate and critical look at my process of learning to be a reflective practitioner. The question I seek to grapple with is quite simply, “What does teacher reflection work to repress?”     

修辞学研究的新探索——评李军教授的《话语修辞理论与实践》

李军教授的《话语修辞理论与实践》是一部颇具新意的修辞学论著,构拟了新的话语修辞理论体系,探索了修辞手段的新系统和修辞学研究的新领域,展示了话语修辞研究的方法论原则,在理论上和实践上为修辞学的发展作出了贡献。     

Teachers performing gender and belonging: a case study of how SENCOs narrate inclusion identities

This paper investigates how the narratives Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs) tell can be framed as social, discursive practices and performances of identity by analysing accounts offered in focus groups and life history interviews. I explore how the narratives deployed demonstrate an engagement with a rhetoric about who works in inclusive education. I argue that this rhetoric informs the materialisation of what Butler terms an ‘intelligible identity’ (1993, 2004), one which might be identified as a SENCO identity because it is gendered as feminine and caring. However, I explore how some of these narratives simultaneously negotiate and refigure rhetorical constructions of intelligible identities by invoking a child-centred warrior persona to alternatively iterate belonging to the special educational needs community. Thus my analysis considers the potential for personal narratives to decouple gender from a rhetoric of caring and identifies potential alternatives for claiming a SENCO identity.     

Distribution of public education spending for the poor: The case of yemen

This paper explores the issue of how a country for which the prioritization of public spending towards poverty reduction is a key policy concern can monitor the distributional effects of public spending. Employing standard benefit-incidence analysis, this paper empirically examines how public education spending is currently distributed in Yemen. It also considers the extent to which the distributional benefit to the poor should and can be improved, focusing on possible changes in cost sharing for higher education and on associated changes in budget allocations. The findings support the government’s decision to increase cost sharing while maintaining a high overall level of public education spending and provide a benchmark from which to monitor the impact of this and other education spending decisions on the poor.     

Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century

This essay critically examines the reemergence of World War II in public culture. By analyzing four popular memory texts (the World, War II Memorial, Saving Private Ryan, The Greatest Generation, and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial) as well as the discourse circulating about them, it argues that these reconstructions of the past function rhetorically as civics lessons for a generation beset by fractious disagreements about the viability of U.S. culture and identity.     

Contentious dialogue: University presidential response and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

ABSTRACT

In recent years, technology has made it possible, and at times critical, for college and university presidents to increase their campus-wide public communication. However, there is little research that analyses these frequent and timely presidential communications. Using grounded theory, this study took steps to fill this gap by analysing the unprecedented response campuses had to the 2016 United States presidential election of Donald Trump. The analysis focused on the responses of presidents from the fifty state flagship universities and found emergent themes of unity, contentious election, negative event, university values, civil dialogue, services offered, and emotional rhetoric, while also finding significance in whether the letters were sent proactively or reactively.     

Ong and Derrida on Presence: A case study in the conflict of traditions

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of ‘presence’ actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called ‘analogues for intellect.’ After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong and Derrida draw from ‘presence’ proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions