When homelessness becomes a “luxury”: Neutrality as an obstacle to counterpublic rights claims

Rhetorical scholars have consistently demonstrated the value of engaging with difference in processes of public deliberation, yet publics still regularly make arguments on the basis of neutrality. Using a case study of advocacy for homeless bills of rights, I employ rhetorical field methods to assess vernacular responses to counterpublic rights claims. By attending to neutrality’s rhetorical force in practice, I examine how it enables publics to deny counterpublic assertions of inequality and obstruct counterpublic rights claims. I argue that neutrality allows publics to deny counterpublics’ needs, define counterpublics’ identities, and disguise their own self-interest. The theory of neutrality I offer here pushes rhetoricians beyond questions of its (un)desirability and (im)possibility to an understanding of how it operates.     

Resisting “national breast cancer awareness month”: the rhetoric of counterpublics and their cultural performances

Since 1984, October has been recognized in the U.S. as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In 1997, the Toxic Links Coalition of the Bay Area, California, began organizing annual “Stop Cancer Where It Starts” tours to counter attempts to obscure the environmentally-linked causes of cancer. By drawing on research including participant observation, this essay analyzes the politics of these two publics in an attempt to illustrate the limits of a binary conceptualization of publics and counterpublics and to emphasize the rhetorical value of the cultural performances that constitute public life.     

Networked counterpublics and discursive contestation in the agonistic public sphere: political jamming a police force Facebook Page

Drawing from agonistic public sphere perspectives, this study examines the jamming of the Hong Kong Police Force Facebook Page by users from its establishment in October 2015 to March 2016. 203 posts accounting for 96,791 comments were analyzed using a mixed-method approach. Findings showed that the early posts were heavily jammed with three types of counterpublic comments: (1) calls for justice regarding alleged police brutality during the Umbrella Movement one year prior, (2) emotional statements with impolite tone, and (3) accusations of comment deletions by the Page administrators. But, the relative intensity of the three types of counterdiscourses diminished over time. Moreover, despite the extensive use of embedded YouTube videos as counterdiscourses in the comments, there were few URL linkages to Hong Kong's dynamic counterpublic sphere. This study highlights the opportunities and constraints of Facebook's technological architecture for activists and networked counterpublics to challenge dominant discourses in situ.