Indian technology start-ups have flourished in the past decade in sectors such as ride-hailing, hotel-booking, and at-home personal services, which have been supported by national programs and Silicon Valley ideas of market disruption. Drawing on Miller’s foundational work on “technological consciousness,” this article demonstrates how start-up origin stories construct an ethos that is aligned with nationalist and casteist privilege, which are the closed system's principal values. Expanding northern hemispheric exclusionism, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of entrepreneurial, professional, and technical communication with a critical view of how globalized discourses legitimize individual entrepreneurship by strengthening and obscuring the ideological tension between casteism and meritocracy.

Abstract The Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021 identified Rashid Buttar, Joseph Mercola, and Ben Tapper as members of the “Disinformation Dozen,” responsible for pseudoscientific social media content and vocal advocates against the COVID-19 vaccines. Despite regulatory efforts to de-platform them, these influential entrepreneurs (two osteopathic physicians and a chiropractor) persist. Analyzing their messages, this essay demonstrates how anti-vaccination arguments in the wake of the pandemic align pseudoscience and masculinity using the logic of secrecy and revelation. This contrasts significantly with pre-pandemic arguments against vaccines, notably childhood immunizations such as the MMR and MMRV, which drew on feminized discourses of maternal instinct. The insights of our essay inform two areas of inquiry, primarily: the study of anti-vaccination advocacy, specifically its gendered assumptions and warrants; and the study of contemporary rhetorics of secrecy, specifically the political alignments of pseudoscience and gendered public aggression.

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding recent controversies involving echo chambers and social media, “post-truth” has always been central to philosophical investigations of what is knowable and good. The internal tension of the term offers a choice: to gasp in feigned astonishment at the hell-in-a-handbasket state of public discourse, or to reflect critically on what is beyond, after, or other than the truth. In this essay, we approach post-truth via elements of narrative, biography, and myth, portraying Friedrich Nietzsche's polytropic figure, Zarathustra, as he might have spoken to the contemporary moment. We demonstrate how Zarathustra affords access to the idea that truth (in all its deceptiveness) and life (or possibly, aliveness) are inextricable in the human condition. To temper this tension, we depict a character whose disposition toward post-truth spans from certainty and doubt to exuberance and despair. Our hope is to indicate how, for the humans of Motley Cow, post-truth is ubiquitous, institutional, and infrastructural.

This essay complements and complicates research on immigration discourse by intersecting two post-humanist understandings of “face.” Analyzing post-9/11 news media's enfacements of the “Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern immigrant,” I employ the works of Paul de Man and Emmanuel Levinas to explicate, on one hand, the inscription of subjectivity onto alterity, and, on the other, the slippage of this inscription. I demonstrate that figurations of immigrants rely on the tandem rhetorical operations of apostrophe and prosopopeia, the giving of voice and face. Public rhetorics impose a mask, an intelligible signifier onto the unknowable Other. Inevitably, however, alterity speaks, and “face” in another sense breaks through; the mask that mediates immigrants in public culture is exceeded. The essay concludes with implications for a posthumanist immigration ethics, not motivated by a personal commitment to the Other, but discoverable in the Leviansian conversation and the “experience” of exposedness.

Book Review| December 01 2011 Rhetorics of Engagement and Activism: Questions Moving Forward Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement. Seth Kahn and Jonghwa Lee.Democracies to Come. Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney.The Public Work of Rhetoric. John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan.Rhetorics for Community Action. Phyllis Mentzell Ryder.Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists. Jason Del Gandio. E. Johanna Hartelius E. Johanna Hartelius Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (4): 781–798. https://doi.org/10.2307/41935246 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation E. Johanna Hartelius; Rhetorics of Engagement and Activism: Questions Moving Forward. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2011; 14 (4): 781–798. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41935246 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. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

That a single author creates a rhetorical artifact is fundamental to traditional genre theory. This article draws on posthumanist notions of linguistic “citationality” in order to divest the epideictic rhetoric of the Minuteman Project of the fantasy of the original author. We argue that, in epideictic engagements, language is reinvigorated; it recurs and circulates infinitely, accumulating meaning in each new instantiation. Using a text with considerable ethical complexity, we examine three themes of particular interest to posthumanism: accountability/responsibility, the potential for (political) resistance, and community. Epideictic discourses tell us not only who to be, but how to be; from a posthumanist point of view, those constructs, we claim, are enfoldments of the exterior. By positing citationality as key dimensions of genre, and following the theoretical works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, we explicate the significance of subjectivity as a rhetorical outcome of the social.

ABSTRACT Applying a theory of homology to rhetorical pedagogy, this article suggests that Plato's and Augustine's discursive methods—dialectic and hermeneutics/homiletics respectively—function as unlocking devices via their formal structures. Dialectics unlock the discourses produced in/about the sensory world to reveal a higher level of material reality; hermeneutics/homiletics unlock Biblical ambiguities to produce a truer level of insight. Unlocking discourses, thus, give access to knowledge that would otherwise lie beyond reach for the untrained. The attention to form permits a different perspective on interpretation and pedagogy than more traditional approaches because it emphasizes audience's cognitive and “erotic” response to form and style.