Rhetorical Tactics Research Articles

Weibo Criticism of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary as an ‘Enemy Within’: Rhetorical Tactics and Discourse Practices of Voluntary Propaganda in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper examines the discourse practices of voluntary propaganda on social media in response to Fang Fang’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Analysis of Weibo data reveals the use of negative labeling and grouping tactics to discredit Fang Fang as a ‘public intellectual’ and a traitor in the anti-‘public intellectual’ discourse. Additionally, the positive mobilization tactic was employed through moral teaching in the ‘positive energy’ discourse to portray her as having negative energy, in contrast to the prototype of a good citizen. The analysis highlights the adept use of rhetorical tools by voluntary propagandists in adapting their discourses to specific events. However, it also exposes loopholes in voluntary propaganda, where ambiguous discourses may legitimize criticism of the regime and uphold the liberal sphere in cyberspace. This study sheds light on the discourse practices of voluntary propaganda on social media and their implications for political communication in contemporary China.

The New Media Art world in Turkey: Boundary-work in action

In an age marked by the Post-media condition, the term ‘New Media Art’ remains in use in reference to a professional territory not autonomous, but also different from the territory of Contemporary Art, and its members use various rhetorical tactics to maintain and expand their professional authority. This study aims at analyzing the professional ideology of the New Media Art territory in Turkey using Thomas F. Gieryn’s concept of the ‘boundary-work’. The data obtained via semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with a purposively sampled population of artists, curators and producers are used to assess whether a common cultural repertoire exists in this territory and whether it conforms to or contradicts its global counterpart. The study finds that since the mid-1990s, the professional ideology of the New Media Art territory in Turkey has developed in parallel with the world, but not monolithically. The curators/producers’ ideology is defined by potential for democratization, intersections of art, science and technology, interaction/interactivity and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, they exhibit two repertoire variants positively correlated with the subjects’ career orientations. The artists’ common ideology is similar to the curators’/producers’, but their cultural repertoires are more flexible thanks to the variety of their individual practices. The study concludes that this duality emerges due to the limited funding sources in Turkey.

Money talks: Analysing the PGA Tour-LIV Golf jurisdictional contest via Western media narratives

This paper analyses Western media narratives of the jurisdictional contest between LIV Golf, a novel upstart professional golf tour, and the long-established PGA Tour, generally understood to be the pinnacle of men's professional golf. In doing so, the paper seeks to answer two research questions: How do dominant incumbent sporting professions utilise the court of public opinion to defend their territory from encroachment by new rivals? What are the potential implications of such professions’ failure to successfully do so? Viewed through the lens of Abbott’s concept of ‘bump-chains’, this paper shines critical light on how the long-established and dominant PGA Tour and its partisan (but not full contingent of) members initially sought to defend their territory against encroachment by a new entrant to the profession of competitive golf, before capitulating and proposing a ‘merger’ with LIV Golf in June 2023, which as of July 2024, has still not materialised, nor the finer details even made public. Utilising a critical qualitative analysis of popular Western-centric news media sources, the paper argues that the PGA Tour adopted a three-fold set of defensive rhetorical manoeuvres to seek to de-professionalise LIV Golf and discredit it in the court of public opinion as a convincing rival to the incumbent profession. It concludes that the PGA Tour's rhetorical defence attempts and thus its position as a dominant superordinate were untenable in the face of the new entrant's reach and power. In doing so, the paper adds theoretical depth to our understanding of bump-chain attacks within the sporting arena, and also acts to highlight sporting jurisdictions’ vulnerabilities to encroachment by previously unconsidered entities. These findings bring implications for governing bodies and institutions in the sporting arena concerning the strength of their jurisdictional positions, extending beyond professional boundaries.

Lizzo’s intersectional visibility politics: contesting colonial beauty standards and dismantling the white heteropatriarchal gaze

ABSTRACT The body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.

STUDYING STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE INTEREST IN TEXT FROM A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

This work will focus on text-based interest, which may be found in this article using a linguistics method. The principles of linguistics of emotions, which integrate the findings of language and psychology studies, provide the groundwork for this strategy. The paper delves into the linguistic methods of text-based interest analysis and how they relate to interest's function in interactive instructional discourse. One definition of active, emotion-evoking discourse is the communicative scenario in which an informative text piques the reader's curiosity. The speaker's goal in adopting interest-evoking rhetorical tactics—that is, strategies for generating texts to evoke the audience's attention—is to "evoke the recipient's interest" in this particular discourse. Applying techniques from communicative-functional linguistics, we may analyze these systems. First, we can pinpoint specific tactics with the use of these methods. The essay uses two such systems—text dialogization and contextualization—in Russian textbooks as an example. Second, to implement these tactics, the communicative-functional approaches show the most important ways of using language and producing finished content. We think these methods are what people mean when discussing the concretization of text content, developing text emotiveness, and forming text dialogicity.

Rise and Fall of the Reformer Topos? Presidents, Alliance Politics, and the Paradoxical Reinvention of Middle East Autocrats as Agents of Change

Abstract The United States and Middle East autocracies do not make for the most natural of allies. One of the most common rhetorical tactics used to defend these alliances is to portray the ruler in question as a reformer who is steering his country into alignment with American sociopolitical norms. We argue that this tactic emerged out of realist assessments of foreign policy during the Cold War. However, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's attempt to deploy this topos during the Trump presidency met mixed results, calling into question the ability of leaders to balance between idealist and realist strains of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. This essay explores the ramifications of this outcome, including how increased information access may portend the eventual demise of the reformer topos and signal the need for new topoi to legitimize American alliances with Middle Eastern autocracies.

POWHR to the People: Fighting for Climate Justice and Opposing the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia

ABSTRACT This case study explores the rhetorical tactics and strategies of grassroots environmental efforts to oppose the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) in Appalachia. I emphasize the use of epideictic rhetoric by POWHR in their advocacy for climate justice

Crises information dissemination through social media in the UK and Saudi Arabia: A linguistic perspective.

This study investigates health-promoting messages in British and Saudi officials' social-media discourse during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic. Taking discourse as a constructivist conception, we examined the crisis-response strategies employed by these officials on social media, and the role of such strategies in promoting healthy behaviors and compliance with health regulations. The study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the tweets of a Saudi health official and a British health official that focuses on keyness, speech acts, and metaphor. We found that both officials utilized clear communication and persuasive rhetorical tactics to convey the procedures suggested by the World Health Organization. However, there were some differences in how the two officials used speech acts and metaphors to achieve their goals. The British official used empathy as the primary communication strategy, while the Saudi official emphasized health literacy. The British official also used conflict-based metaphors such as war and gaming, whereas the Saudi official used metaphors that reflected life as a journey interrupted by the pandemic. Despite these differences, both officials utilized directive speech acts to tell audiences the procedures they should follow to achieve the desired conclusion of healing patients and ending the pandemic. In addition, rhetorical questions and assertions were used to direct people to perform certain behaviors favored. Interestingly, the discourse used by both officials contained characteristics of both health communication and political discourse. War metaphors, which were utilized by the British Health official, are a common feature in political discourse as well as in health-care discourse. Overall, this study highlights the importance of effective communication strategies in promoting healthy behaviors and compliance with health regulations during a pandemic. By analyzing the discourse of health officials on social media, we can gain insights into the strategies employed to manage a crisis and effectively communicate with the public.

The Persistence of “Consilience”: Reexamining a Rhetoric of Collaboration Across the Science-Humanities Divide

ABSTRACT This essay examines discourse surrounding contemporary calls for consilience, a form of interdisciplinary collaboration articulated by E. O. Wilson aimed at uniting the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from a Darwinian perspective. This essay builds on earlier examinations of Wilsonian consilience by analyzing a sample of texts that reflect a “second wave” of consilience and shifting rhetorical tactics over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that current calls for consilience reflect heightened rhetorical awareness among authors and that additional rhetorical work is required to gain adherence among diverse cross-disciplinary audiences. Implications are discussed for future research into enactments of consilience-style interdisciplinary research.

Wise (Teen) Anger on Twitter: Greta Thunberg Uses “Bio Warfare” to Reshape Oppressive Anger Norms

“Bio warfare” describes a digital rhetorical tactic used by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

Florynce Kennedy’s Cultivation of Reproductive Expertise in Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz and Abortion Rap

ABSTRACT This essay centers the legal and coalitional strategies of Black feminist Civil Rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in pre-Roe v. Wade abortion rights advocacy. Examining the depositional records of the 1969 case Abramowitz v. Lefkowitz and its subsequent distillation into the 1971 book Abortion Rap, we demonstrate how Kennedy’s rhetorical tactics enabled white women’s reproductive experiences to be intelligible—but centered—as expertise in the legal domain. Kennedy’s lines of questioning enabled feelings about unwanted pregnancies to become intelligible as expertise, challenging the authority of established experts. Kennedy impatiently leveraged her expert knowledge of the legal system to manage the state’s objections that threatened the well-being of witnesses and integrity of the case. While Abortion Rap appealed to the intersections of Black women’s reproductive concerns, it also hindered the possibility for coalitional trust to be built between legal experts and Black Power activists around abortion advocacy.

Neofascist “Thugs,” Pandemic Protests, Populisms: Giorgia Meloni’s Cerchiobottismo and the Rise of Fratelli D’Italia During the Pandemic

In this essay, I examine the rise to power of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), the populist far right Italian party led by Giorgia Meloni, in the 2022 election. I first situate FdI’s victory in the complex context of the Italian experience of the pandemic—exploring the erosion of the democratic sentiment in Italy after COVID-19 and the mutual influences of crises and the shaky anti-establishment and anti-intellectual epistemologies of populisms. I then proceed to examine Meloni’s recurring rhetorical strategy to deal with FdI’s problematic relationship to fascist heritage during the electoral campaign. Specifically, I analyse Meloni’s rhetorical maneuvers as instances of cerchiobottismo. Cerchiobottismo is an Italian term that explains the practice of strategic ambiguity typical of seasoned politicians that can juggle two sides, telling both sides that they are partially wrong, without compromising too much of the rhetor’s own position. In the second part of this essay, I unpack Meloni’s cerchiobottista rhetorics in a set of three significant examples in relation to the 2022s election and the controversies over fascism to illustrate how Meloni rejected the repeated public accusations of fascist nostalgia in her party, while boosting FdI’s electoral appeal among a moderate electorate and also reassuring international stakeholders.

Ivo van Hove and Almodóvar: Remixing The Human Voice

Ivo van Hove and Almodóvar: Remixing <i>The Human Voice</i>

Animo nullius: on AI's origin story and a data colonial doctrine of discovery

AbstractThis paper traces elements of the theoretical origins of artificial intelligence to capitalism, not neurophysiology. It considers efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formalize a science of mental behaviour using the dynamics of social rather than neural phenomena. I first revisit early American theorists’ controversial ambivalence toward neurophysiology, showing how this group benefited from post-war corporate and military investments in commercial and imperial expansion, which sustained and expanded their influence over the emerging field. I then trace the lasting effect of the founders’ early rhetoric through AI's institutionalization after 1960, arguing that from the 2010s technology corporations set out to veil their enclosure of the data commons via appeal to a curious precedent: the scientific pedigree of AI. By relating the field to the history of capitalism, and specifically the rise of assetization in modern technoscience, I invite reflection on AI's origin story and on broader parallels between historical colonialism and data colonialism. I offer a heuristic – animo nullius, for ‘no persons’ mind’ – as an attempt to name rhetorical manoeuvres that leverage the authority of mind-as-computer metaphors in order to naturalize acts of seizure.

Afrika'nın ilk kadın başkanı olan Ellen Johnson Sirleaf'ın Açılış konuşmasının retorik analizi

This study intended to analyze Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s presidential inaugural speech as the first&#x0D; female president in African to see how she persuaded and convinced the people of Liberia on&#x0D; political, social and economic policies in an effort to make them believe in her content to&#x0D; consolidate power. Specifically, this study focused on rhetorical and persuasive strategies she&#x0D; applied in her speech. To achieve the intended goals, rhetorical discourse analysis methodology&#x0D; was used, and Ellen’s textual inaugural presidential speech was quantitatively analyzed by both&#x0D; Neo-Aristotelian and feminist methods of rhetorical analysis to discover, identify and describe&#x0D; how Ellen used rhetorical devices, rhetorical appeals and other rhetorical tactics. Results indicate&#x0D; that various rhetorical tactics were found in her speech, and were well applied which helped her&#x0D; to effectively accomplish her intended objectives as an orator.

The Concept of ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Modern Japanese Intellectual Discourse

This article explores the historical semantic changes of the concept ‘Oriental despotism’ in modern Japan. In premodern Japanese political discourses, the term sensei (despotic rule) was already widely known among Confucian scholars via the ancient Chinese classic Zuo Zhuan. However, it was the introduction and wide circulation of Montesquieu’s De l‘esprit des lois (The Spirit of Law, 1748) in the early Meiji period that instilled in the modern Japanese language the concept Toyoteki senseishugi (Oriental despotism), a complex orientalist explanation of Asia’s authoritarian system of rules. Though first a concept that informed the Meiji authority of the civilizational hierarchy of different forms of government and warned of the need for constitutional democracy, Oriental despotism became, in the course of Japan’s growing encounters with its Asian neighbours after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the theoretical premise of a ‘stagnant Asia’ and served as an ideological justification for Japan’s expansion in Asia. This article analyses the different perspectives, arguments, and rhetorical manoeuvres of the Japanese political and social scientists who most actively contributed to the discourse on Oriental despotism from the early Meiji period to the postwar era. It identifies four independent yet related discourses on Oriental despotism in modern Japan and argues that the influx to Japan in the 1930s and 1940s of theories on society’s modern transformation had ultimately determined how this concept would be interpreted, applied, and understood in postwar Japan.

Crip the elders and get out of white privilege free

The question of identity positioning in relation to engagement with issues of social exclusion is complex. I am a white non-disabled South African man working on disability and care issues....

Storylines of Geoengineering in the Australian Media: An Analysis of Online Coverage 2006–2018

ABSTRACT In the light of inadequate global emissions mitigation, geoengineering – solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal – is increasingly being positioned and problematized by some researchers, policymakers, and advocates as a partial solution for avoiding catastrophic levels of warming. However, there are concerns that geoengineering may serve as a rhetorical tactic for delaying emissions reduction. As the news media field is an important space in which storylines surrounding geoengineering are created and circulated, the manner in which media actors discuss these topics is an important factor that can legitimate some policy pathways and close off others. In this paper, we analyze patterns in news media coverage of geoengineering in Australia to identify four dominant storylines: “a symptom of systems failure”, “silver buckshot”, “the Faustian bargain”, and “time for plan B”. We consider the implication of these storylines for the role that geoengineering may play in the Australian climate policy regime. We identify a risk geoengineering may be positioned as a rhetorical tactic for delaying emissions reduction. However, we note that the storylines in the public sphere provide a basis for public debate that engages critically with geoengineering, engaging with risks and differentiating solar radiation management from carbon dioxide removal.

Investigating the white racial equilibrium and the power‐maintenance of whiteness

AbstractThe white racial equilibrium is a social, historical, and cultural location where whiteness is insulated from critique and the importance of race is largely ignored by white people. The expectation of the white racial equilibrium is one way white people define their whiteness, and this expectation protects white supremacist epistemologies and ideologies. We completed interviews with fourteen white undergraduate students to understand more about the processes employed by students when challenged by the white racial disequilibrium. Using consensual qualitative research (CQR), we coded their responses and found seven representative domains, with two categories endorsed by every participant: “assumption of valid knowledge” and “non‐racist beliefs.” While some respondents displayed thoughtfulness about race and whiteness, findings suggest that most participants attempted to restore the white racial equilibrium by centralizing the innocence and beneficence of whiteness and white people through various rhetorical maneuvers, including (1) invoking superficial and incomplete knowledge of complex racial topics, and (2) depersonalizing themselves from racist acts and ideas, among others. This study contributes to the whiteness literature by providing descriptions of how white students attempt to re‐establish the white racial equilibrium after facing disruptions to their expectations for conversations about race. Implications for anti‐racist psychologists are discussed.

Conversion and Polemic in the Late-Fifteenth Century Ottoman Empire: Two Polemical Treatises Against Judaism

Two Jewish converts to Islam in the service of Bayezid II penned the earliest known anti-Jewish polemicals in the Ottoman Empire. This article aims at exploring the historical context of the two epistles and their connection with Islamic polemical literature. The simultaneous appearances of Abd al-Salam’s Risāla al-hādiya and Abd al-Allam’s Risāla al-ilzām al-Yahūd will be discussed in the context of the Sephardic influx to the Ottoman lands, an encounter that stimulated scholarly interest in the Jewish faith among Ottoman intellectuals. At first glance, the two treatises seem to be structured so as to persuade a Jewish audience to embrace the Muslim faith by abandoning their former religion. However, the choice of Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the circulation of the texts primarily among Muslim readers suggest that ad- dressing the Jews appears to have been a rhetorical tactic. Considering the negative connotations attached to converts by the Ottoman elite, the authors might also have viewed the composition of anti-Jewish treatises as an effort to distance themselves from their Jewish past.