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Posts Tagged ‘political discourse’

Psychology, Emotion, and the Human Sciences

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Rhetoric, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , , , on March 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The program for the University of Windsor symposium on Psychology, Emotion and the Human Sciences is now available at http://www.thehumansciences.com/programme/.  Registration should be available in a few days.

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Ad feminam

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Fallacies, Informal Logic, tagged , , , , , on March 4, 2012| 4 Comments »

Rush Limbaugh’s recent dismissal of Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” reminds me of how much more vulnerable women are than men to the abusive ad hominem.  There is a a greater number of abusive words associated with women:  add “whore,” “bitch,” “cunt,” “old maid,” “hag,” “bag,” “jezebel,” “hoochie mama,” etc., as opposed to “prick,” “dick,” and “boy toy.”  Plus the feminine insults tend to be considered so bad that people often won’t actually say them, but only allude to them, for instance in saying “the c-word.”

On top of that, women tend not to be listened to, so the ad hominem may always be more effective against women.  Merely pointing out that a speaker is a woman may act as reason to ignore her. The same would apply to any marginalized people.  One’s very identity can undermine one’s claims and one’s reasons.

Lorraine Code has argued in a few places that the dismissal of women’s reasons for being women’s reasons should be identified as ad feminam.  The vulnerability of women to ad hominem suggests indeed that ad feminam deserves recognition as a distinct category.

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CFP: Creating Publics, Creating Democracies

Posted in CFP, tagged , , , , , , , on January 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Status: CfP Call for papers
Conference
Creating Publics, Creating Democracies
18.06.12-19.06.12
University of Westminster, London, UK

That there is a relationship between publicness and democracy has often been taken for granted. However, at this time of widespread instability, political upheaval and experimentation, when publics are increasingly being called upon to act, it is sometimes in the name of democracy, but not always. By exploring how ideas and practices of publicness and democracy are being constituted, enacted, related and reconfigured in different settings, this workshop aims to investigate the modes of public action and democracy being invoked, imagined and struggled over around the world. We welcome paper proposals from a diversity of approaches, particularly research and works in progress that help us to collectively consider: (more…)

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CFP: NORDISCO 2012

Posted in CFP, tagged , , , , , on November 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The 2nd Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction, NORDISCO 2012  will be held 21.11.12-23.11.12 at Linköping University, Sweden.

First call for papers:

Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 March 2012 –

After its initial successes in Aalborg, Denmark, in November 2010, NORDISCO is emerging as a biennial event, whose goal is to create a Nordic and Baltic forum bringing together researchers and doctoral students who are investigating discourse and interaction from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. It is now our pleasure at Linköping University, Sweden, to host NORDISCO 2012, in the hope that the second Nordic and Baltic interdisciplinary conference will give rise to creative synergies and facilitate new networks, crossing both geographical and disciplinary borders. The focus of the conference is on the organisation, structure and constitution of text, discourse, talk and social interaction. We therefore welcome researchers’ contributions from different and diverse fields of enquiry, including – but not limited to – discourse studies, conversation analysis, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, interaction analysis, rhetoric, narrative analysis, discourse theory, political discourse analysis, social semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, applied linguistics, gesture studies and communication activism, as well as approaches to discourse and interaction to be found in sociology, political science, environmental science, economics, media studies and cultural studies. (more…)

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On Being Your Own Argument

Posted in Connections, News, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , , , on November 18, 2011| 2 Comments »

Occupy, out of focus

Let’s be honest about this, coverage of the Occupy movement has neither been fair nor balanced in most cases.  What coverage there has been has usually centered on 1) how much of a mess these sites are making, 2) on how the absence of explicit demands makes them “incoherent”, and 3) on how the major political parties may or may not try to turn the frustrations of the protesters to their advantage in the coming national election cycle.  Much of the coverage that I’ve seen has focused on the second of these items, on how the protests seem to be just a sort of collective “acting out”.  “With no clear message”, so goes the refrain, “how can the Occupy protesters hope to achieve their aims (whatever they are)?” (more…)

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International Colloquium: Argumentation in Political Deliberation

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, Pragma-dialectics, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , , , on August 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

International Colloquium “Argumentation in Political Deliberation”
ArgLab – IFL
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa

2 September 2011

Political deliberation, understood as a public debate aimed at forming political opinions and deciding what course of action to take, has traditionally been seen as a prime venue for public reasoning and argument. Aristotle considered political deliberation – next to forensic dispute and public oratory – as one of the three main genres of rhetoric. Today, different modes of political deliberation – from formal institutional procedures in parliaments, to public hearings, to citizens’ conferences, to televised debates, to informal online discussions among “ordinary citizens” – are at the centre of interest in argumentation theory, deliberative theory of democracy, and communication and media studies alike.

The goal of this colloquium is to bring together scholars from these interrelated disciplines to examine the role, shape and quality of argumentation in political deliberation. A theoretical and empirical focus of the presentations and discussions will be on the practices of argumentation. The questions addressed include: How can we best theorize, analyze and evaluate argumentation in the context of political deliberation? What is the impact of the contextual conditions in different deliberative activities on the shape and quality of public argument? What are the typical forms of deliberative argument and counterargument? To what extent is the “virtual public sphere” transforming the way we engage in public argument? Does it allow for inclusive participation and genuine argumentative debate between advocates of various political views? By addressing these questions, the colloquium hopes to provide a focused account of the multifaceted argumentative practices in political deliberation.

The colloquium is part of a project Argumentation, Communication and Context sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT: PTDC/FIL–FIL/10117/2009) and carried out at ArgLab, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

For more information, visit the colloquium web page.

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Call for Papers: CADAAD 2012

Posted in CFP, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The fourth international conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD) will take place at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, 4-6 July 2012.

CADAAD conferences are intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research. We welcome papers dealing with any contemporary social, scientific, political, economic, or professional discourse/genre. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

(more…)

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The Validating Experience of Extremity: Esquire on Roger Ailes

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , , on January 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Rioters burned Priestley's home not for what he did, but for what he said about revolution.

Extremists are never bored.

Tom Junod’s remarkable piece on Fox News mogul Roger Ailes in Esquire magazine is well worth your time anyway, but for rhetoricians and students of political argument it’s pure gold–a look inside the head of the man who is largely responsible for the shape of American political discourse. It’s a long article but it pays back the effort with chestnuts like these:

What Roger Ailes has done at Fox is find a way to mainstream extremity for fun and, of course, for profit. He’s found out that people need the validating experience of extremity in the same way that he does. And he takes extreme positions and says extreme things because he needs to, because they allow him to make the choice that’s at the heart of his power.

If nothing else, Junod should be given an award of some kind for coming with a phrase that encapsulates so much about where American political discourse (and increasingly global political discourse) is today.  The “validating experience of extremity”– a notion big enough to capture both the vague anger of everyday people struggling to make the mortgage payment and the kind of madness that drove Jared Lee Loughner– is a phenomenon we should all be watching very closely.  There is perhaps no single, more important fact about the current political environment than that it is driven by this experience.

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