Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics

Abstract

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. The strength of this collection and its chapters is the focus on the amorphousness of protests, how rhetoric as an act and as a set of persuasive means should be studied as unruly, communicative potentials in many modes. . . . Unruly Rhetorics is a refreshing, blatantly political collection that sits at a crucial intersection in the field of rhetoric and writing studies—that of rhetorics of protest and theories of incitement and action. 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 possibilit