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Showing papers in "Communication and Critical\/cultural Studies in 2015"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: There has been a recent surge in artistic designs to conceal oneself from ambient surveillance in public places as mentioned in this paper and these center on the masking of identity to undermine technological efforts to fix someone as a unique entity apart from the crowd.
Abstract: There has been a recent surge in artistic designs to conceal oneself from ambient surveillance in public places. These center on the masking of identity to undermine technological efforts to fix someone as a unique entity apart from the crowd. Ranging from fractal face paint and hairstyles, to realistic resin masks, to reflective underwear, anti-surveillance camouflage ostensibly allows people to hide in plain sight. These designs, however, enact an aestheticization of resistance premised on individual avoidance rather than meaningful challenge to the violent and discriminatory logics of surveillance societies.

41 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors read the "Punk Prayer" as an image event with an extensive afterlife, mobilized through the transnational icon of the balaclava, and argued that transnational symbolicity enables transnational solidarity, an affective sense of connection and responsibility.
Abstract: August 17, 2012 was a “Global Day of Action” in support of Pussy Riot, a radical feminist performance group from Russia who had been incarcerated for their “Punk Prayer” at the altar of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. This paper reads the “Punk Prayer” as an image event with an extensive afterlife, mobilized through the transnational icon of the balaclava. By reading its production (socially and spatially) along with its circulation, evident in solidarity protest images, it argues that transnational iconicity enables transnational solidarity, an affective sense of connection and responsibility.

29 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that Red Tourism is better conceived as a social space, both produced and productive, and shed additional light on the close ties between propaganda and space that have been largely invisible in the field.
Abstract: This article examines Red Tourism through a case study of Yan’an, China. Drawing upon social/critical scholarship on media and space, the author argues that Red Tourism is better conceived as a social space, both produced and productive. Specifically, from the qualitative data derived from this study and through a spatial analysis of architecture, urban planning, and the museum of Yan’an, the author argues that Red Tourism was created by the state to xuanchuan/propagandize its revolutionary past and attached politico-ideological legitimacy by catering to the postsocialist nostalgia on the one hand, and is producing a dynamic “Red” economy through the commodification of the space on the other. Departing from Henri Lefebvre's powerful thinking around the production of space, this article sheds additional light on the close ties between propaganda and space that have been largely invisible in the field.

23 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that feeling for the state throughout the training legitimizes expanded sovereign power and organizes affective labor to police racialized bodies and behaviors, and offer implications for readings of biopolitics that foreground affect.
Abstract: This essay argues that Eye on Awareness™, a recent deployment of the If You See Something, Say Something™ Department of Homeland Security campaign in US hotels, disciplines workers in order to organize their senses for the state, a process I term “feeling for the state,” by subtly redefining what it means to see the terrorist as what it means to feel the terrorist. I argue that feeling for the state throughout the training legitimizes expanded sovereign power and organizes affective labor to police racialized bodies and behaviors. I conclude by offering implications for readings of biopolitics that foreground affect.

20 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications and demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event.
Abstract: We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethical self.” We argue that while the humanitarian impetus is to disturb and redress global inequality and injustice, which includes exposing and interrupting the failures of neoliberalism, the makeover paradigm is intimately connected to and reinforces individualized “moral citizenship,” which conforms to and reinforces neoliberal values.

19 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the family's inability to conform to "ideal whiteness", a whiteness that displays dominant cultural standards bolstered by neoliberalism, makes them exemplars of inappropriate whiteness, a marginal identity presented as humorous and authentic.
Abstract: Depictions of white working-class people are steadily on the rise in reality television. To understand this phenomenon, and the ways in which it articulates white working-class people in the United States today, I analyze Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a popular reality series on TLC featuring a self-described “redneck” family. I argue that this series highlights the family's inability—because of their working-class status—to conform to “ideal whiteness,” a whiteness that displays dominant cultural standards bolstered by neoliberalism, such as wealth, rationality, personal responsibility, and self-control. The family members consequently become exemplars of “inappropriate whiteness,” a marginal identity presented as humorous and, through the use of surveillance and spectacle, authentic.

16 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the summer of 2013, celebrity chef Paula Deen found herself embroiled in a scandal. Named as a co-defendant with her brother Earl “Bubba” Hiers, Deen faced accusations that the restaurant she an...
Abstract: In the summer of 2013, celebrity chef Paula Deen found herself embroiled in a scandal. Named as a co-defendant with her brother Earl “Bubba” Hiers, Deen faced accusations that the restaurant she an...

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The origin and handling of ingredients, the modes of production and distribution involved, the social contexts of consumption, and the invention and processing applied to the end product are discussed in this article.
Abstract: How we eat—the origin and handling of ingredients; the modes of production and distribution involved; the social contexts of consumption; and the invention and processing applied to the end product...

13 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the interpellation of museum visitors as citizen archaeologists, a process that re/produces racialized discourses through rhetorics of science and time, and argued that as visitors excavate remnants of the past they engage an archaeological vision that reinforces dominant constructions of "modern" citizenship.
Abstract: Portrayals of the US Southwest's Native American inhabitants as “primitive” relics have been shaped by the intertwining practices of archaeological collection and museum display. Focusing on the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, this essay analyzes the interpellation of museum visitors as citizen archaeologists, a process that re/produces racialized discourses through rhetorics of science and time. It is argued that as visitors excavate remnants of the past they engage an archaeological vision that reinforces dominant constructions of “modern” citizenship. This vision maintains colonial histories by disallowing Native peoples both authorship of the past and belonging in the present.

12 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the use of such analogizing elides difference, prevents meaningful and complex conversations about power and oppression, and makes visible the material intersectional tensions between and among communities of color and gay and lesbian communities and how these discourses further marginalize those that identify as queer people of color.
Abstract: This essay charts a critical intersectional rhetoric as a means for understanding the articulation of a Civil Rights Movement (CRM) analogy in marriage equality campaigns. Analyzing the campaign against Proposition 8, California's version of the Defense of Marriage Act, I argue that the use of such analogizing elides difference, prevents meaningful and complex conversations about power and oppression, and makes visible the material intersectional tensions between and among communities of color and gay and lesbian communities and how these discourses further marginalize those that identify as queer people of color. Through criticism of campaign commercials, movement strategy, and the protest rhetoric after the proposition passed, I argue that CRM analogy discourse historicizes racism, privileges white gay identities, and exacerbates divisions that prevent coalition building.

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors investigates instances of modernities in the backyard and their implications for studying post-colonial popular culture in Hindi language superhero comics produced by Raj Comics since the 1980s, and provides unique material to chart out the lineaments of postcolonial culture, gender and power in order to provincialize the scope of cultural studies.
Abstract: With a focus on the Hindi language superhero comics produced by Raj Comics since the 1980s, this article investigates instances of “modernities in the backyard” and their implications for studying postcolonial popular culture. The graphic narratives in the comic books are neither simply Westernized or transgressive, nor necessarily framed by a mythicized or Orientalised discursive framework. Instead, they register a distinctive heritage combining vernacular and mythic prototypes with hypermodern visions with which to imagine new powers for Indian men and women, even though women may continue to be shaped by the masculinist, desirous gaze and modulated by patriarchal expectations to do with female docility and marriageability. The enquiry provides unique material to chart out the lineaments of postcolonial culture, gender, and power in order to provincialize the scope of cultural studies.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the tolerance rhetorics of two Muslim-American rhetors whose testimonies reveal the tensions, contradictions, and complicities involved in claims of national belonging in the controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque and found that they function differently to re-center the white non-Muslim subject and to structure inclusion and belonging within the nation.
Abstract: The local controversy over Cordoba House or the “Ground Zero Mosque” peaked at a May 2010 Lower Manhattan Community Board meeting that was open to the public. Examining the tolerance rhetorics evoked both for and against Cordoba, this paper argues that both tolerance rhetorics function differently to re-center the white non-Muslim subject and to structure inclusion and belonging within the nation. Extending the literature of tolerance, which tends to focus on the discourse of normative subjects, I analyze the tolerance rhetorics of two Muslim-American rhetors whose testimonies reveal the tensions, contradictions, and complicities involved in claims of national belonging.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored how the language of radicalization has evolved and how it has come to shape available arguments and define the legitimacy of participants (and non-participants) within recent congressional hearings and legislation.
Abstract: This essay focuses on the language of domestic radicalization as it has been invoked in recent debates regarding homeland security and the specter of homegrown Islamic terrorism. The language of radicalization is not new. However, beginning in 2004 and 2005 this language began to be appropriated into legislative and law enforcement discussions of domestic terrorism and national security. Using the rhetorical figure of polyptoton as a critical frame, this essay explores how the language of radicalization has evolved and how it has come to shape available arguments and define the legitimacy of participants (and non-participants) within recent congressional hearings and legislation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze the political economic consequences of this particular configuration of broadband infrastructure and argue that Google Fiber operates as a mechanism of flexible capital whereby the emphases on short- over long-term relationships, meritocracy over craftsmanship, and the devaluation of past experience in favor of potential outcomes are embedded in the institutional and technical infrastructure of the United States.
Abstract: On March 17, 2010, the United States Federal Communications Commission identified broadband as “the great infrastructure challenge of the early twenty-first century.” One month earlier, on February 10, 2010, in anticipation of the FCC's announcement, Google announced its intent to build ultra-high-speed broadband networks across the United States to serve as a model for overcoming this challenge. Since then, Google Fiber, as it is called, has succeeded in being recognized as a model for other communities interested in establishing ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure. This article serves as an analysis of the political economic consequences of this particular configuration of broadband infrastructure, and argues that Google Fiber operates as a mechanism of flexible capital whereby the emphases on short- over long-term relationships, meritocracy over craftsmanship, and the devaluation of past experience in favor of potential outcomes are embedded in the institutional and technical infrastructure of ul...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Charles H. Woolbert Research Award as discussed by the authors recognizes essays that have become "a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena" but that "may well not have [been] seen" as heuristic when
Abstract: The Charles H. Woolbert Research Award honors essays that have become “a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena” but that “may well not have [been] seen … as heuristic when ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that while cookbooks “invite readers into specific subject positions, some of which are more attainable than others, they provide cooks with opportunities for communicating who they are and who they might want to be.”
Abstract: Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call “common sense.” However, Isaac West argues that while cookbooks “invite readers into specific subject positions, some of which are more attainable than others”, they provide cooks with “opportunities for communicating who they are and who they might want to be.” Critical/cultural scholars have documented how cookbooks, domestic advice manuals, and food television socialized women into the cult of feminine domesticity. Meanwhile, if men were hailed by domestic food discourse it was as a caveman-like caricature of alpha males cooking large portions of meat over open flame. By and large, male cooking has taken place in professional kitchens, where a chef’s credentials and a hypermasculine environment situate cooking as a manly vocation. Despite the recent growth in women ascending the ranks of professional kitchens, most women report the persistence of a male locker-room culture in the restaurant industry. Meanwhile, a surge in men’s interest in cooking has imported such cheflike machismo into home kitchens. While women still do a majority of household cooking, Generation X men are more involved in the kitchen than their fathers. “Gastrosexual” men spend significantly more time shopping, preparing food, and consuming culinary media. Jon Miller notes that the growing numbers of professional women who are equal or sole income-earners have contributed to “a reallocation of time and duties” in the home. This shift has been accompanied by

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that a critical orientation toward a hermeneutics of suspicion forced rhetoric into a disagreement about where to locate rhetorical effect: in the instrumental success of a speaker to persuade an audience or in the constitutive character of the rhetoricity of symbolic action.
Abstract: “Another Materialist Rhetoric” (AMR) argued as rhetorical critics encountered the problem of social power, an orientation toward rhetoric’s materiality was apprehended by a hermeneutics of suspicion that sought to reveal the reality behind rhetoric’s appearance. A critical desire to account for how rhetoric might sustain, adapt, and challenge relations of social control had confused materiality with those relations of power. AMR also argued that the critical orientation toward a hermeneutics of suspicion forced rhetoric into a disagreement about where to locate rhetorical effect: in the instrumental success of a speaker to persuade an audience or in the constitutive character of the rhetoricity of symbolic action. In contrast to these hermeneutical approaches to social power and rhetorical effect, AMR turned to Foucault to argue there was something more at stake about rhetoric’s materiality than discovering how rhetoric hides relationships of power. For AMR, it was Foucault’s later writings on technologies and techniques of governance that provided another way to secure rhetoric’s materiality. It required, the essay argued, a rhetorical cartography to replace the hermeneutics of suspicion. AMR appeared at an opportune moment. Those who experienced rhetorical theory in the early to mid 1990s could not avoid noticing how the re-animation of judgment’s premodern/early modern affiliation with phronesis/prudentia (practical reasoning) brought with it a new attention to rhetoric’s role in managing contingency. At conferences and in publications on judgment Sloop and I would compare notes about materiality. AMR advanced Foucault’s description of a technology as a form of practical reasoning and translated rhetoric into a “technology of deliberation.” Approaching rhetoric as a technology, AMR argued, would expand the material modalities in which rhetoric participates. To approach rhetoric technologically is to note that the material relationship between the discursive and nondiscursive was not that between symbol and world, but the articulation of different material modalities into an apparatus of power. The interpretive gap between word and thing (with the bad tendency to put materiality on the side of the thing) keeps alive a hermeneutics of suspicion by trying to uncover the more primordial thing (materiality/power) behind and below the word. But if rhetoric is approached as a technology of deliberation, then the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive is no longer relevant because rhetoric materializes itself to the extent it folds and is folded into a governing apparatus. What is more important than trying to decide whether the discursive or nondiscursive

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose the notion of the "jazz vernacular" as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically.
Abstract: This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into “neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative o...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Another Materialist Rhetoric as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in Critical Studies in Media Communication, and it was published in the same issue of Critical Studies of Media Communication (CSMC).
Abstract: While my brief comments below are ultimately meant to celebrate Ron Greene’s “Another Materialistic Rhetoric,” I cannot help but begin by noting I have spent my entire career learning from (and hopefully with) Ron Greene. While we graduated from two different graduate programs at roughly the same time, we graduated during a brief moment in which students at the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois routinely met, argued, and compared notes on our research projects. The conversations always felt heady and useful, with our group bringing a stronger Communication Studies bent to the conversation and theirs bringing one inflected more by Grossberg style cultural studies. So, full disclosure: I approach this task counting Ron Greene as a friend, as one of the many people he has always “taken care of” through inclusion in string references in his essays. In addition, I should note that I have special affection for “Another Materialist Rhetoric” in that I have an essay published in the same issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Ron and I spent months fretting over our individual essays as we revised and revised toward publication (and waited, interminably, for a response from the editor). Hence, I approach this task not only with a fondness for Ron Greene as a friend and scholar, but with a sense of shared history with the essay itself. Let me begin, then, with Ron’s one obvious mistake with “Another Materialist Rhetoric”: the title. Rather than referring to this as “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” which would seem to make it one of many, Greene herein provides a complex understanding of what a materialist rhetoric might mean and what it might do. The title, in other words, is simply too humble. Rather than “Another,” Greene provides a definition of materialism and rhetoric that encompasses and surrounds previous definitions, theoretically and critically. Indeed, to the degree that Greene has gone on to flesh out the meaning of this materialism through a critical project, he in some sense defines materialist rhetoric for the field. Moreover, and this is what I want to illustrate in the brief pages which follow, it is in Ron’s subsequent work—notably his analyses on films produced by the YMCA in the early twentieth century—that one finds the manifestation of what a materialist rhetoric can mean as a critical

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: This article examines the widespread popularity and criticism of American Pickers, a show that transforms commodity fetishism into televisual fare. The show presents the pickers as model consumers through three types of images-of-affection: action-images where exchange is presented as reality, affection-images that portray positive affection as spiritual possibility, and impulse-images that naturalize production as a source of value. Such representations have generated significant criticism for exploitation. I argue that these criticisms, although instructive about resistance in control society, remain limited because they consider Pickers a representation of reality rather than an active engineering of it. Instead, Pickers should be envisioned as an expression of control society, a business strategy that circulates images in order to generate feedback that can then be tracked, targeted, and channeled. Such strategies enable Pickers to control markets by transforming products and directing access. Focusin...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine the value of language as both a means of comprehension and a product that has currency in the television marketplace, and 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.
Abstract: 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.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, this paper reported that television newscasts, LIFE Magazine, and other media sources "horrified people around the world" by presenting audiences with "photographs of starving children [caught in the civil...
Abstract: Circa 1967–1970, television newscasts, LIFE Magazine, and other media sources “horrified people around the world” by presenting audiences with “photographs of starving children [caught in the civil...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that we become who we are by extending hospitality to different and differing representations of who we were like a name or a land, all the while being unable to reduce this differential relationship to a self-identical ipseity.
Abstract: This paper deals with the hospitality and hostility of Turkish Cypriot identity in North Cyprus in its various configurations today. It contends that we become who we are by extending hospitality to different and differing representations of who we are like a name or a land, all the while being unable to reduce this differential relationship to a self-identical ipseity. This differential relationship is the origin of identity and not a singularly self-sufficient subjectivity inherited from a past history and culture. Using the alibi of an inheritance cannot hide our complicity in the production of that history and culture anew in the present. This shift in perspective opens “Turkish Cypriot identity” to its future becoming, hopefully to a future beyond ethnocentrism, towards a form of solidarity different from the border politics of a paternal hospitality like that of nation states.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Woolbert Award and the recognition of Greene's contributions to our discipline and, specifically, his essay "Another Materialist Rhetoric" as discussed by the authors have been widely celebrated in the last few years.
Abstract: In a letter to a friend, Spinoza wrote, “between friends all things, particularly things of the spirit, should be shared.” It follows then that friends share in common thoughts and knowledge, love and affects. In thinking about the Woolbert Award and Ronald W. Greene’s work, it becomes apparent that those of us celebrating Greene’s recognition all have in common our appreciation of Ron, as we have been affected by his intellectual thought expressed in his academic work. This being in common brings us together to celebrate Greene’s achievement and the recognition of his contributions to our discipline and, specifically, his essay “Another Materialist Rhetoric.” But I am not going to speak of “Another Materialist Rhetoric.” Instead, I am going to discuss “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor.” Why this essay? Because this essay reflects the work in which I feel most “in common” with Greene. I was a graduate student when “Rhetoric and Capitalism” was published; it was during this time that I was reading and studying with Greene and our cohort at MN—we were all schlepping around our copies of Hardt and Negri’s Empire— and Greene’s concept, “communicative labor,” greatly influenced my work. In “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” Greene developed that formative concept, and thus disrupted the discipline and our understanding of rhetorical agency and, in the process, solidified the biopolitical turn. For me, as for many of Greene’s students with and after me, this biopolitical turn and the concept of communicative labor made it easier for us to write about affect, immaterial labor, and contemporary capitalism in our discipline. Greene created the intellectual map for us and made the arguments that we now do not have to make. We can just write, “see Greene’s work” on “materialist rhetoric,” “communicative labor,” “money/speech,” and so on. I refer to “communicative labor” as a disruptive concept to indicate that any becoming is fostered by a disruption; in this case, communicative labor is a disruption to previous theorizations and understandings of rhetorical agency and its conceptualization within our existing mode of capitalism. Greene offers us what he terms a “different materialist ontology,” a materialist ontology that “stands in excess of the capture of economic or social relations.”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis.
Abstract: In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may “engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the US Supreme Court has ruled that states enforcing parental consent for abortion laws must provide a judicial bypass procedure whereby a pregnant minor might convince a judge that she is mature enough to make the abortion decision on her own or that an abortion is in her best interests.
Abstract: The US Supreme Court has ruled that states enforcing parental consent for abortion laws must provide a judicial bypass procedure whereby a pregnant minor might convince a judge that she is mature enough to make the abortion decision on her own or that an abortion is in her best interests. This institution provides an excellent site for exploring the performative constraints imposed on liminal subjects appealing to the law for recognition. Building on the insights of feminist legal theorists, this essay argues that petitioners are structurally compelled to devalue embodied knowledge and grounded relationships, credibly express gender and age-appropriate emotions, and perform their devotion to patriarchy. Ultimately, petitioners can transcend their liminal status only by offering a performance that demonstrates a sincere affective investment in a self-effacing mode of political subjectivity.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL) as mentioned in this paper traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia and foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships.
Abstract: Currently, scholars grapple with media that depict Third World women as either victims of unchanging contexts or agents of liberation To explore how a widely distributed and popular documentary film can destabilize a First World gaze, this essay examines Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL), which traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia ILL foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships Through its unique relationships between filmmaker and subject, ILL suggested a transnational feminist perspective on women in media

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Another Materialist Rhetoric as mentioned in this paper was one of the essays that won the National Communication Association's 2013 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award, which recognizes a publication that has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of speech communication phenomena.
Abstract: Ronald Walter Greene’s essay “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” originally published in 1998, won the National Communication Association’s 2013 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award. The award recognizes a publication that has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of speech communication phenomena. Greene’s essay won the award due to its influence in rhetorical studies and beyond. In November 2014, those of us involved in this special section participated in a panel intended to acknowledge and explore the importance of Greene’s essay. I was sufficiently impressed with the quality of the essays that I contacted Professor DeChaine about the possibility of publishing them as a special section. I am delighted that he agreed to do so. “Another Materialist Rhetoric” has become a touchstone for critical/cultural approaches to rhetorical studies. The essay provides a critical re-reading of the materialist traditions of rhetorical studies as tacking back and forth between a constitutive and instrumental approach to rhetorical effects. The result is a three-part intervention that aims to re-orient the terrain of rhetorical studies toward the problems of governance more than the success or failure of persuasion, per se. First, Greene advocates an alternative model of rhetorical effects based less on symbolic and/or representational dynamics and more based on the institutional uptake of rhetorical practices as techniques and technologies of deliberation. Second, by focusing on institutional uptake, Greene provides a way to use insights from cultural studies about articulation as a method for mapping the power dynamics of rhetorical practices. Third, by positing rhetoric as technique and technology, as opposed to symbolic action or representation, the essay creates a space to re-think the rhetorical significance of media forms and institutions as contributing less to the fragmentation of contemporary culture and more to the governance of specific populations. The primary criterion for the Woolbert is the enduring significance and influence of a publication. In this case, the evidence is clear that Greene’s essay has proven itself to be enormously influential. The available evidence for such a claim is both quantitative and qualitative. When Greene’s essay was nominated for theWoolbert, Google Scholar reported 121 citations of the article since its publication, over one-third of which occurred since 2010. As I write this introduction in mid-May, 2015, the total is up