Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics

by Jonathan Alexander (Editor), Susan C. Jarratt (Editor), Nancy Welch (Editor)

Overview

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of “unruliness” in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical, political, and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression – embodied, print, digital, and sonic – Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness, more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity, is constitutive of the political itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822986430
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	930 KB

About the Author

Jonathan Alexander (Editor)
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor's Professor of English and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication and currently directs the Humanities Core Program. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of twenty-two books, and in 2023 he was given the Exemplar Award by the Conference on College Composition in Communication in recognition of career achievements.

Susan C. Jarratt (Editor)
Susan C. Jarratt is professor emerita in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and editor of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2016–19).

Nancy Welch (Editor)
Nancy Welch is professor of English at the University of Vermont where she teaches classes in public writing, fiction writing, and social movement rhetorics. She is also the coordinator of the UVM Graduate Writing Center.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt

Chapter 1: Feminist Body Rhetoric in the #unrulymob, Texas, 2013
Dana L. Cloud

Chapter 2: Walking with Relatives: Indigenous Bodies of Protest
Joyce Rain Anderson

Chapter 3: A Groove We Can Move To: The Sound and Sense of Quebec’s Spring 2012 Manifs Casseroles
Jonathan Sterne

Chapter 4: Steven Salaita’s Rhetorical Refusal: Taking to Twitter as a Form of Political Resistance and Protest
Matthew Abraham

Chapter 5: SlutWalk is Not Enough: Notes Toward a Critical Feminist Rhetoric
Jacqueline Rhodes

Chapter 6: Informed, Passionate, and Disorderly: Uncivil Rhetoric in a New Gilded Age
Nancy Welch

Chapter 7: Circulating Voices of Dissent: Rewriting the Life of James Eads How and Hobo News
Diana George and Paula Mathieu

Chapter 8: We Are Not All in This Together: A Case for Advocacy, Factionalism, and Making the Political Personal
Kevin Mahoney

Chapter 9: The Tone It Takes: An 18-day Sit-in at Syracuse University
Yanira Rodríguez and Ben Kuebrich

Chapter 10: The Steven Salaita Case: Public Rhetoric and the Political Imagination in U.S. College Composition and Its Professional Associations
John Trimbur

Chapter 11:  Answering the World’s Anticipation:  The Relevance of Native Son to Twenty-First-Century Protest Movements
Deborah Mutnick

Chapter 12: Dignitas and “Shit Shovels”: Corporate Bodies and Unruly Language
Jason Peters

Chapter 13: Remix as Unruly Play and Participatory Method for Im/Possible Queer World-Making
Londie T. Martin and Adela C. Licona

Chapter 14: On Democracy’s Return Home: The Occupation of Liberty/Zuccotti Park
John Ackerman and Meghan Dunn

Chapter 15: Then Comes Fall: Activism, the Arab Spring, and the Necessity of Unruly Borders
Steve Parks, with Dala Ghandour, Emna Ben Yedder Tamarziste, Mohammed Masbah, and Bassam Al-Ahmad

Afterword: Science, Politics, and the Messy Arts of Rhetoric
Nancy Welch
 

Editorial Reviews

Unruly Rhetorics is a smart, funny, and provocative collection of articles that are theoretical, pedagogical, historical, and sometimes polemical, but that always usefully interweave theoretical concerns with specific examples. The authors include scholars from both the speech and composition regions of rhetoric, thereby making the collection particularly useful for teaching.” —Patricia Roberts-Miller, University of Texas at Austin
 

“The resistance at Standing Rock Reservation, the Keystone XL pipeline protests, the teacher walkouts in Oklahoma—these events warrant the attention of scholars, inviting us to take seriously the use of disruptiveness as a rhetorical tactic and catalyst for social change. Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics, edited by Johnathan Alexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch, offers a timely meditation on these very issues, as it seeks to uncover the communicative possibilities of protest at a time when the most strident forms of activism are dismissed as ‘uncivil.’” —Great Plains Quarterly
 

“It will continue to influence my advocacy and teaching in years to come.” —Sarah Banting, Rédactologie

From the Publisher