Rhetoric & Public Affairs Dec 2019

“Righting Past Wrongs”: Rhetorical Disidentification and Historical Reference in Response to Philadelphia’s Opioid Epidemic

Ashley P. Ferrell

Abstract

Abstract Opioid addiction and overdose are widely recognized as a contemporary “crisis” across the United States. To address rapidly increasing mortality rates related to this substance use epidemic, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office announced in January 2018 that it would encourage the development of supervised injection sites or “Comprehensive User Engagement Sites” within city limits. Official communications cited select moments from the region’s past to frame these sites as urgent while constituting a supportive, unified public. Through remediating disidentification, a mode of rhetorical contestation and reformulation, local community members used an alternate historical framing to resist dominant ideology and revise the terms of the related public discourse. By further developing the concept of rhetorical disidentification, this essay demonstrates how the deployment of historical analogy in response to proposed public health interventions can enable the public recognition and potential address of systemic racial inequities.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2019-12-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0533
Open Access
Closed
Topics
writing across the curriculum multimodality public rhetoric

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

Cites in this index (2)

  1. Carstarphen et al. (2017)
    Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage
    Rhetoric Review
  2. Mills (2014)
    The Pirate and the Sovereign: Negative Identification and the Constitutive Rhet…
    Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Also cites 12 works outside this index ↓
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  2. 15. Anjali Vats, “Marking Disidentification: Race, Corporeality, and Resistance in Trademark Law,” Southern C…
     ↗
  3. 19. Vats, “Marking Disidentification: Race, Corporeality, and Resistance in Trademark Law,” 240. For an examp…
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  4. 30. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech …
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  7. 51. Studies tracking U.S. mortality rates of white non-Hispanic individuals from 1999 to 2013 have shown a re…
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CrossRef global citation count: 3 View in citation network →

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