This essay argues for embodied dialog among scholars from different global situations as an academic practice crucial to anticolonial transformation. The essay illustrates this practice by recounting the critical interpretations of two differently situated anticolonial persons and the changes in interpretations wrought by our dialog. We draw on postcolonial and dialogic orientations and recent materialist theories that envision rhetorical scholarship as "making" in order to encourage expansion of the range of depictions of Muslims in literature. The analysis employs a persona theory revised through Burkean dramatism and the anticolonial perspective. The transformative potential of the approach is illustrated by a dialogically executed analysis of the Pakistan-focused novel, The Spinner's Tale, by Omar Shahid Hamid.

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

Abstract The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of “failed leadership” that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an ethos-based relationship between public health expert and public. Because any leader’s public ethos is dependent on the cultural ethos of audiences who promote them to leadership, this essay combines the Aristotelian topoi for ethos (goodsense, goodwill, goodness) and contemporary redefinitions of ethos as cultural-level phenomena (either “dwelling places,” ideologies, or ethical and cultural codes) to conceptualize ethos as the activation, rebuilding, or maintenance of relationships among different social positions: publics and institutions. The complexities of the Ebola epidemic—with its national and international dimensions and its partially faulty scientific grounding—make visible the predisposition toward positional gaps between publics and public experts regarding interests (eunoia) and goods (arête), with concomitant difficulties for the sharing of practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristotle was correct that such gaps cannot be bridged by logos, and the pervasive insistence on more logos as corrective therefore may contribute to public mistrust of all expertise.

Words Are Weapons provides an important guide to the rhetorical techniques and motivational force of the globally influential rhetoric that Philippe-Joseph Salazar names as “caliphal.” Salazar's focus on responses based in the rhetorical forms of the “appeal,” however, relies on an inaccurate conception of transcendence and on identity formation that is inadequately appreciative of the global mobility of humans. The central value of “passionate respect for others” should indeed not be totalized. However, the forms of rhetoric that are better for the times must be multilogic in order to forge the kind of social relations that will enable mobile global populaces to interact in relative peace to create new forms of art, philosophy, and eloquence, even as we struggle to learn to protect our global home.

Research Article| September 01 2015 Bruce Gronbeck’s Gift: A Hermeneutics of Hospitality Celeste M. Condit Celeste M. Condit Celeste M. Condit is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, Athens. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (3): 567–574. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.3.0567 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Celeste M. Condit; Bruce Gronbeck’s Gift: A Hermeneutics of Hospitality. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2015; 18 (3): 567–574. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.3.0567 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In 2012, the World Health Organization not only condoned the creation of “super-flus” (high lethality strains with heightened transmissibility), but also urged greater dispersal of these strains among research facilities around the globe. This essay analyzes that decision process using an updated theory of logos and pathos that incorporates contemporary understandings of emotion and the human brain into prescriptions for public deliberative decision-making processes. That analysis shows that, because the decision process was necessarily executed through the affective reasoning processes of the 22 narrowly-selected individuals invited to the meeting, it could not provide an optimal decision process. The essay therefore proposes that the World Health Organization should adopt an on-line, open-access discussion process for deliberating about major decisions about world health policies. The basis for the decision in affect (pathos) rather than in ostensible logos is demonstrated by textual and contextual evidence produced by the participants.

Since 1984, academic essays addressing the public rhetorics of science and technology have embodied at least four purposes: theory-building, discounting scientific representations, deprecating scientific influence, and strategizing to improve the efficacy of scientific rhetorics. Some of these purposes are in conflict with each other, but there has been little explicit discussion about the purposes for ARST studies. This essay argues in favor of a synthetic vision that places humanistic, social scientific, and natural science endeavors as part of an over-lapping set of practices, each of which demonstrably makes distinctive positive contributions to globalizing human consciousness. The essay argues that the few existing studies illustrate how increased internationalism in ARST studies is not only important in its own right, but also could provide one academic route for expanding the imagined relational possibilities among humanistic "critics," the natural or social sciences, and broader societies.

Scholarship concerning visual representations in science, technology, and medicine is in a preliminary phase. This essay surveys selected areas where visually-oriented rhetorical studies of science, technology and medicine are emerging. It examines the relationships between visual and verbal dimensions of scientific, technical, and medical texts; raises questions concerning the appropriateness of using concepts from the linguistic tradition to analyze visuals; and outlines fruitful areas for further study, ranging from studies of the truth-value of images through public communication about visualizations.

T here is a long-standing tension between the community and rheto ricians of with regard to the status of truth and the objectivity of knowledge. While neither the community nor the community of rhetorical scholars can be said to be monolithic in their views, the scientific view ascribes objective, permanent, and universal status to the facts produced by scientists, whereas the view supported by many rhetoricians describes facts as products of social conditions, and therefore marked by inter-subjectivity, transience, and situational delimitations. The classical account thus sees facts as discovered, whereas the sophistic rhetorical account portrays them as constructed (e.g., Fuller; Gaonkar; Gusfield; Latour; Latour and Woolgar; Lessl; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey; Taylor, Defining Science).' As a variety of scholars have suggested, this bifurcation of views can be resolved into a unified perspective that accounts for the major arguments advanced by those supporting each of the classical orientations (Bambrough; Bernstein; Laudan, Explaining Success). It is possible, in other words, to see facts as both objective and situated-both faithful to material realities and responsive to social conditions (Howe and Lyne). From this unified perspective, scientists can make errors either because their contact with asocial material realities are flawed (e.g., cold fusion) or because there are flaws in their application of the linguistic and social codes that convey the character and meaning of the contact they have made with material realities. This essay explores the persistence of bad science of the latter sort by reporting and interpreting an interaction between scientists and a rhetorician, one that occurred when I sent a letter to the journal Science responding to a publication on brain sex research by Gur et al. (Sex Differences), which appeared in that journal. I was later interviewed by a reporter for a major newspaper with regard to my letter and the Gur research. The texts for this study therefore include the Gur research article, my letter, a reply to my letter by the authors of the Gur article, the two reviews of my letter solicited by the editor of Science, and the journalistic account of my letter and the scientists' publications. This essay interprets the response of these scientists and the integration of their work into the public sphere through theories of demarcation. It suggests that bad science, at least that which supports an ideology that is hegemonic in the social sphere,2 is maintained by a complex relationship beRSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 83 Volume 26, Number 4 Fall 1996