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Lucille Ball’s 1953 testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee is a rhetorical puzzle. How was a woman with documented Communist affiliation able to avoid being blacklisted? The intert...

To tell the whole story of the struggle for woman suffrage, we need to begin the story well before 1848 and continue it long after 1920. For those teaching about woman suffrage, this essay offers r...

Debate is a civic skill necessary for democracy. Participation in debate is important not only because it teaches habits of advocacy that enable a person to win an argument, but because debate, at its best, teaches us how to lose and, in losing, understand why others act the way they do.

Posters for Peace is a beautiful book that captures an ephemeral rhetorical moment and holds it for extended reflection to teach enduring lessons about civic action. This book is for anyone interes...

During the spring of 1919, the National Woman's Party sponsored the Prison Special, a cross-country train tour of 26 white women who had been jailed as a result of their protest activity for woman suffrage. Using visual, embodied, and verbal enactments of imprisonment and civic action, the Prison Special constituted white women's citizenship through simultaneous rhetorics of inclusion and expulsion. The Prison Special's foregrounding of white women's martial capabilities, respectability, and vulnerability justified white women's inclusion in the category of citizen. The Prison Special's contrast of the imprisoned white suffragists to Black women co-prisoners participated in the expulsion of Black women from the category of citizen.

In 1996, Argumentation and Advocacy published a groundbreaking issue devoted to visual argument. It was the first collection of essays on the subject. Twenty years later, we consider some of the do...

On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that "there were no survivors" now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent. In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, "reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world" (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers-often for those who lost their lives there--that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of remembrance at a site and solidify the history of a community. In so doing, they fix the limits and establish the boundaries of that community. Because of the perceived permanence of sacred sites, visitors often attach special significance to the civics lessons carved in stone and cast in bronze on the sites' monuments (Rosenzweig & Thelan, 2000, p. 105). Although scholars have attended to the construction of narratives at memorial sites, and the conflicts that often accompany such constructions (e.g., Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Gallagher, 1995; Gallagher & LaWare, 2010; Hubbard & Hasian, 1998), the question of how these narratives are argued for or against-particularly after a monument is dedicated-is under-theorized. In this essay, we explore how argumentation works at sacred sites, and how arguments about the past, once carved in stone and cast in bronze, may be countered. We suggest that attempts to stabilize memory in monumental form may be countered through several argumentative strategies, including dissection, transformation, and substitution. Each of these strategies destabilizes memory and opens up sacred spaces to alternative articulations of the past by expanding the lives deemed worthy of remembrance and grief. We believe that traditional understandings of refutation as linguistic negation (answering the claim "x" with the response "not x") cannot account for the unique strategies that excluded groups have used to argue at these sites. Recent work on visual argument has elaborated new modes of nondiscursive countering and we, in turn, extend these modes into three-dimensional experience by analyzing three highly-contested sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. These three sites invite comparison. Each was consecrated by the blood of the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative of its history, and each has been the site of sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation of monuments, the functions of argument in sacred space, and the use of sacred space to expand communal boundaries. Although monuments compete at numerous other U.S. sites (e.g., the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Arthur Ashe in Richmond's Monument Avenue, Albuquerque's Cuarto Centenario Memorial), these three permit exploration of the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and of the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration of who is human and worthy of remembrance. …

Introduction. A Brief History of the National Communication Association Pat J. Gehrke & William M. Keith *Discovering Communication: Five Turns toward Discipline and Association J. Michael Sproule *Paying Lip Service to "Speech" in Disciplinary Naming, 1914-1954 Gerry Philipsen * The Silencing of Speech in the Late 20th Century Joshua Gunn & Frank E.X. Dance *Epistemological Movements in the Field of Communication: An Analysis of Empirical and Rhetorical/Critical Scholarship James A. Anderson & Michael K. Middleton * The Scholarly Communication of Communication Scholars: Centennial Trends in a Surging Conversation Timothy D. Stephen * Sexing Communication: Hearing, Feeling, Remembering Sex/Gender and Sexuality in NCA * Charles E. Morris III & Catherine Helen Palczewski *Liberalism and its Discontents: Black Rhetoric and the Cultural Transformation of Rhetorical Studies in the 20th Century. Reynoldo Anderson, Marnel Niles Goins, & Sheena Howard *A Critical History of the "Live" Body in Performance within the National Communication Association Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, John M. Allison Jr., & Ronald J. Pelias * Listening Research in the Communication Discipline David Beard & Graham Bodie * Conceptualizing Meaning in Communication Studies Brian L. Ott & Mary Domenico * Communicative Meeting: From Pangloss to Tenacious Hope Ronald C. Arnett Afterword. What's Next? William F. Eadie

In 1909, at the height of the woman suffrage controversy and during the golden age of postcards, the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York produced a twelve-card set of full-color lithographic cartoon postcards opposing woman suffrage. The postcard images reflect, and depart from, verbal arguments concerning woman suffrage prevalent during this period. They reflect arguments against suffrage that highlighted the coarsening effect the vote would have on women. The postcards also present an argument that was absent in the verbal discourse surrounding suffrage: that men (and the nation) would become feminized by woman suffrage. Accordingly, these postcards offer a productive location in which to explore how the icons of the Madonna and Uncle Sam, as well as non-iconic images of women, were deployed to reiterate the disciplinary norms of the ideographs of and .

During Denver's 1991 Columbus Day parade, fifty Native Americans briefly blocked the parade. As part of the trial of four protesters, Ward Churchill authored a legal brief that contributed to their...

Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. It is from this "unending conversation" ... that the materials of your drama arise. (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-11) Some forty-two years after Kenneth Burke described history, from a dramatistic perspective, as an unending conversation, Sonja Foss offered "conversation" as a metaphor for rhetorical criticism's process of knowledge development ("Criteria" 288). In rhetorical scholarship, "knowledge and progress cannot be measured in terms of linear accumulation, which assumes that a single vocabulary or metaphor is used by all critics so that pieces of knowledge are built on previous ones.... Given that data cannot be verified objectively, our aim becomes to continue the conversation about the data rather than to discover the truth about them" (Foss, "Criteria" 288). The topic of what constitutes good rhetorical scholarship is one for which an unending conversation is, indeed, in progress, a conversation into which Editor Mike Allen has asked this volume's contributors to dip their oars. Therein lies the challenge. As I enter this ongoing conversation I face the twin risks that I will say too much, repeating what others have already said, and that I will say too little, failing to remember what others have said. Aware of this, I still want to provide a (recognizably incomplete) summary of what I have heard in the conversation (while constantly reminding myself that I am not "qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before" especially since much of it transpired before "the point in history when [I was] born" either as a body or as a scholar.) Beginning with the Spring 1957 special issue of what was then called Western Speech (edited by Ernest Wrage), rhetorical scholars sought to define and clarify what constituted "good" rhetorical scholarship. In 1957, the main problem was the uniformity of critical method and the concomitant search for more diverse approaches. The renamed Western Journal of Speech Communication revisited rhetorical criticism in its Fall 1980 special issue, devoted to the "State of the Art" (edited by Michael Leff. By this point in time, a diversity of approaches to criticism existed: neo-Aristotelian, movement criticism, critical models, genre analysis, and dramaturgical (later called dramatistic). Writing elsewhere, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell celebrated the diversity available to scholars on the eve of the 1980s, arguing it was "not a sign of chaotic instability but evidence of the health and maturity of our discipline" ("The Nature" 9). However, Leff still worried that, with the proliferation of theoretical approaches, "critics lack perspectives that enable them to make adequate connections between theoretical constructs and the concrete data of rhetorical experience. The rise of pluralism has broken us loose from old constraints and encouraged fresh activity in the field, but the multiplication of theories does not resolve the tension between theory and practice" ("Interpretation" 342). …

This essay focuses on the debates over the MacKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Pornography Ordinance to explore one instance of definitional argument: the attempt to effect a redefinition. Using Burke's critical matrix of the pentad as a framework, I argue that advocates for a definitional shift created the possibility for a “terministic catharsis” by simultaneously locating pornography in multiple locations on the pentad, highlighting its act/agent/agency fonctions.

Anzaldua argues that all writing should be connected and personalized like letters. Both the content and the form of Anzaldua's letter make it a text worthy of attention as well as a text suitable for challenging Euro‐Americans to rethink their approach to texts by people of color. This paper argues that a letter is a distinct rhetorical form that enables an author to suspend the non‐addressed audience in an a‐critical position, and that an alternative approach to rhetoric is to understand communication as embodied.

As feminist critiques of epistemology challenge the way we know, and critiques of rhetoric challenge the way we persuade, it makes sense that feminist critiques of argumentation should soon follow,...

(1993). The Divisiveness of Diversity: President Bush's University of Michigan Commencement Speech as an Example of the Linguistic “Turnaround”. Argumentation and Advocacy: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 16-27.

(2013). Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue. Argumentation and Advocacy: Vol. 49, Special Issue: Political Campagin Debates in the 2012 Election. Guest Editor: Mitchell S. McKinney, pp. 237-237.