Edited collection Call for Proposals from Nancy Welch, Jonathan Alexander, and Susan Jarratt Unruly Rhetoric The Battle in Seattle. The Arab Spring. The Wisconsin Uprising. Occupy Wall Street. Protest movements and cultures of activism across the globe have come to life in the 21st century. As activists respond to changing economic and global conditions, the question arises: are we seeing new modes of protest? The digitally and televisually mediated nature of much contemporary activism has drawn recent scholarly attention and is certainly one of the important aspects of recent activist work. Yet fascination with new technologies can obscure how much, as labor economist Kim Moody suggests, seemingly new forms of organization and resistance arent new in history but instead are reclaimed as new for this era. Moreover, while some executions of embodied protest can seem conventional, unexceptional, carefully scripted and staged, recent spectacles of bodies in protest—and the physical force of the state mobilized to contain unruly bodies—demonstrate that the physical body remains a powerful rhetorical tool. From this angle we can consider how much 21st-century protests are grounded in long histories of activism and lively inter-animations of old and new rhetorical means. For instance, during Quebecs mass student strikes that fought off tuition hikes and toppled the provincial government, student unions turned to social media to publicize key days of action. But it was the sea of red-shirted college students filling the boulevards, joined by thousands of residents in traditional pot-banging protest, that repeatedly transformed the city of Montreal into a public space for broadcasting the students demands. Quebecs Maple Spring thus joins a long history demonstrating how by definition protest puts bodies disruptively in public space. We call for essays that analyze rhetorically, historically, and materially contemporary activist practices and that examine in particular the continuing role of the body and dis-ease regarding body rhetoric and visibility, especially in movements and actions for social and economic justice. Questions contributors might take up include How are bodies “online” and “on the line” mobilized for rhetorical action? What interactions of body rhetoric and other rhetorical means work to create public space and public hearing? What threats do unruly rhetorics stage to the body politic and what role do ideals and pedagogies of civil discourse play in guaranteeing the integrity of the body of the citizen? How might new platforms of dissemination or longstanding rhetorical assumptions about civil discourse and effective argument be informed and complicated by unruly bodies? How can historical and genealogical examination complicate and enrich analyses and judgments that might otherwise be drawn from single locations and moments of upsurge? What does a fuller understanding of the role--and the dis-ease regarding the role--of the body in effective rhetorical action bring to the teaching of activist or social movement rhetorics? Essayists will necessarily pay attention to local examples and to the mediations of communication technologies but should also think genealogically about the development of activist strategies over time, particularly how strategies are picked up and deployed in relation to mobilizing bodies and in relation to longer histories, legacies, and relationships of activist work. Please send 300-word abstracts by November 15 to [email protected],[email protected], and [email protected]
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:57:28 +0000
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