Research

Covid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic (Michigan State UP, 2023. Edited by Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland and Jennifer Malkowski) is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.

Contributions include:

"Introduction: An Agenda for Pandemic Rhetoric," Allison L. Rowland, Emily Winderman, and Jen Malkowski

Part One: Pre-existing and Chronic

"Covid and Racialized Myths: Pre-existing Conditions and the Invisible Traces of White Supremacy," Raquel M. Robvais

"Covid and Environmental Atmospheres: Pulmonary Publics and Our Shared Air," Sara DiCaglio

"Covid and Science Denialism: The Rhetorical Foundations of US Anti-Masking Discourse," Kurt Zemlicka

"Covid and Vaccine Hesitancy: Tracing the Tuskegee-Covid Straw Man Fallacy as a History Presently Unfolding," Veronica Joyner and Heidi Y. Lawrence

Part Two: Essential and Disposable

"Covid and Essential Workers: Medical Crises and the Rhetorical Strategies of Disposability," Marina Levina

"Covid and Being a Doctor: Physicians' Published Narratives as Crisis Archive," Molly Margaret Kessler, Michael Aylward, and Bernard Trappey

***"Covid and Fatphobia: How Rhetorics of Disposability Render Fat Bodies Unworthy of Care and Life," Hailey Nicole Otis***

"Covid and Intersex: In/Essential Medical Management," Celeste E. Orr

Part Three: Remedy and Resistance

"Covid and Shared Black Health: Rethinking Nonviolence in the Dual Pandemics," DiArron M.

"Covid and Masking: Race, Dress, and Addressivity," Angela Nurse and Diane Keeling

"Covid and Disability: Tactical Responses to Normative Vaccine Communication in Appalachia," Julie Gerdes, Priyanka Ganguly, and Luana Shafer

"Covid and Doubt: An Emergent Structure of Feeling," Jeffrey A. Bennett

As one of the most successful pieces of transnational popular culture, we rhetorically analyze the compelling critique of neoliberal capitalism in the 2020 anime film, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train. Alongside this criticism of neoliberal capitalism, we theorize relations of mujō (無常/impermanence) found in the film, foregrounding this Buddhist principle to advance ways of being that resist neoliberal capitalist impulses. We forward three tenets that emerge in our analysis of this film: (1) recognizing that all beings are embedded within shared entanglements; (2) holding all beings responsible to serve others; (3) transcending the bounds of death by passing the torch of omoi (想い/human feeling). We argue that Mugen Train’s protagonists, the Demon Slayers, embody mujō that demonstrates how those under capitalist subjugation can only be liberated by recognizing human community grounded in such a relational ethic. We thus situate relations of mujō as a critical rhetorical theory that releases us from the neoliberal capitalist pursuit of mugen (無限/limitless).

Social media platforms have heightened the demand for identity-based politics, in which the public expects politicians to display personal aspects of their lives toward strategic ends. Using a multimodal rhetorical approach, this study analyzes the tweets of Ghanaian Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia in his first year after the 2020 election and to understand how he constructs his public image through personalization. Results indicated that he displayed his religious beliefs, strong relationship with his wife, personalized visual graphics, and patriotic participatory acts. The study argues that Bawumia’s identity and Ghana’s cultural context manifest in his personalization on Twitter. The image he constructs and the broader implication of this present study for strategic communication are discussed.

Polio vaccine hesitancy remains high in Pakistan due to various socio-political, religious, and economic factors. To address this, the government of Pakistan and its international partners such as UNICEF have devised a multipronged communication strategy to counter resistance to polio vaccine in hard-to-reach areas of the country. In this strategy, mainstream news media has been identified as a key stakeholder, as they have the potential to reach a wide range of population and disseminate easy to understand messages including both visuals and text. However, less scholarly attention has been paid to how mainstream news media in Pakistan frame polio and polio vaccine in their visuals. This study aims to fill this gap. Using visual framing as a theoretical framework, we analyzed 115 images from three selected newspapers published from 2010 to 2022. Our results suggest that the newspapers depicted hard-to-reach areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province which were more affected by polio and highlighted the criminality and securitization of polio vaccine in the country. In addition, female polio healthcare workers, who are instrumental in eradicating the disease, have been given marginal coverage, reflecting the importance of gender sensitivity in the region. Overall, this study contributes to the fields of visual communication, health communication, and international communication, particularly related to the Global South.

The introduction of the internet brought about many transformations in the political, social, cultural, and educational fields worldwide. This phenomenon of digital transformation introduced a myriad of positive, negative, and paradoxical impacts. This critical essay tackles some of the significant transformations and paradoxes which the introduction of the internet invited in modern Muslim societies, with a special focus on two specific domains. First, the realm of religious authority or obtaining authoritative religious knowledge in the age of the internet. Second, the realm of shifting gendered Islamic identities in the age of cyberspace. In exploring these complex and hybrid phenomena, special attention is paid to the tensions between the opposing forces of tradition and modernity, diversity and cohesion, hegemony and resistance, and globalization and localization in cyberspace, and their numerous and far-reaching effects.

External funding is an important yet understudied area of inquiry in crisis communication research. With external funding being a keystone of assessing and broadening research impact in both academia and industry, it is important for scholarship to examine effective practices for funding proposals. This study explores the best and worst practices for funded research through an expert consultation survey of 36 global communication scholars with track records of funding success. Findings reveal motivating factors for seeking, securing and managing funding, as well as institutional factors. Findings also inform best and worst practices for securing external funding, including bridging theory and practice and establishing strong research partnerships.

Social media have reinvigorated the shift of focus from a party-centered politics to a personality-based one. This has made how politicians personalize on social media, especially in government, consequential for them and their administration. Vice presidents across the globe, especially in the United States, play crucial constitutional roles central to the country’s political discourse. Though they are ignored in the extant literature, their rhetoric has ramifications for contemporary democracy. Using a multimodal rhetorical approach, I analyze Vice President Kamala Harris’s tweets (n = 357) in her first year of office to understand how she constructs her public image through personalization. Results indicated that she displayed strong family bonds, reflected on her education and its influence, her historical accomplishments, as well as her emotional moments. I discuss the implications of the image she constructs in this present study.

One of the most serious challenges which is still threatening Muslims globally is the surge in Islamophobia, or negative attitudes and excessive fear towards Islam and Muslims. The digital age became a double-edged sword when it comes to the threat of Islamophobia. On one hand, it opened the door for anti-Muslim campaigns to spread widely and quickly online. On the other hand, it provided modern Muslims with much-needed opportunities to resist such hateful campaigns using the very same digital tools. This article sheds light on three important strategies which have been successfully deployed by modern Muslims to resist Islamophobia in the digital age. The first is the effective utilization of humor to resist some of the most hateful anti-Muslim campaigns and misrepresentations in cyberspace and present successful counter-narratives. The second is putting faith in action, through Muslim philanthropy and communal giving, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been done by using digital tools to spread and amplify these good deeds, while resisting Islamophobia simultaneously by correcting some of the false images and skewed misrepresentations about Islam and Muslims and replacing them with positive ones. And the third is boosting the visibility of Muslim women’s identities and amplifying their voices, which shatters the negative stereotypes about Muslim women as silent and helpless beings and counters their misrepresentation and marginalization, while countering Islamophobia in parallel. In discussing each of these strategies, the appropriate context is explained and relevant examples are provided to illustrate the arguments made throughout this paper.

"In examining Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric, the authors find a full-bodied politician, not the caricature so often offered up by the media. Using highly novel analytical procedures, the authors point up Clinton’s complexity and dynamism and juxtapose them with the very real prejudices women still face in U.S. politics. This book will rankle the reader. And it should."
—Roderick P. Hart, author of American Eloquence: Language and Leadership in the Twentieth Century

Women candidates are under more pressure to communicate competence and likability than men. When women balance these rhetorical pressures, charges of inauthenticity creep in, suggesting the structural and strategic anti-woman backlash at play in presidential politics. Hillary Clinton demonstrated considerable ability to adapt her rhetoric across roles, contexts, genres, and audiences. Comparisons between Clinton’s campaign speeches and those of her presidential opponents (Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump) show that her rhetorical range exceeded theirs. Comparisons with Democratic women candidates of 2020 suggest they too exhibited a rhetorical range and faced a backlash similar to Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s Career in Speeches combines statistical text-mining methods with close reading to analyze the rhetorical highs and lows of one of the most successful political women in U.S. history. Drawing on Clinton’s oratory across governing and campaigning, the authors debunk the stereotype that she was a wooden and insufferably wonkish speaker. They marshal evidence for the argument that the sexist tactics in American politics function to turn women’s rhetorical strengths into political liabilities. 

The Surviving R. Kelly documentary, which premiered in 2019, chronicled the decades of abuse at the hands of Kelly, with appearances from survivors, their supporters and those closest to Kelly. Although what was presented in Surviving R. Kelly is not necessarily new information, the cultural shift that stemmed from #MuteRKelly and #MeToo helped to catapult the experiences of the primarily Black women and girls into mainstream media and ultimately led to Kelly being convicted of the crimes. Days after the documentary initially premiered in 2019, several Black podcasts reviewed the series – Tea with Queen and J, The Clubhouse with Mouse Jones and Marsha’s Plate. This article will provide a textual analysis of these episodes, as the episodes present a reflection on Black media, community and accountability. This article will explore how podcasts grappled with Black media’s complicity in the tangled web of abuse, while also providing survivor-centred content. Why are podcasts important spaces to grapple with difficult conversations among Black communities? What can podcast episodes show us about survivor-centred content and accountability?