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Dette kritisk retoriske feltarbejde i en kunstnerisk klimatænketank under festivalen Time to Listen – The Ecological Crisis in Sound and Music viser, hvordan klimarelateret lydkunst kan fungere som lydretorik i klimakrisen. Jeg viser, hvordan lydkunst kan fungere som vidnesbyrd til miljøer og fænomener og skabe affektive oplevelser af klimakrisers tidslige og rumlige aspekter. Med observationer fra situeret oplevelse viser jeg potentialer i lydkunst til at justere affektive investeringer i naturromantiske kulturelle forestillinger og antropocentriske relationer til naturen for bedre at indstille mennesker på dens faktiske særhed – de underlige summende og knitrende lyde fra dyr i jorden og svampes kemiske impulser og de barske lyde fra industrielle landbrugsmaskiner. Jeg argumenterer for, at disse potentialer bedre kan rumme klimakrisens kompleksitet end traditionelle retoriske former, der fokuserer på menneskelig handling, og at sådanne former risikerer at reproducere antropocentriske binære relationer mellem menneskelige subjekter og natur. Jeg foreslår i stedet en retorisk tilgang, der tager udgangspunkt i underliggende, ambiente affektive strukturer og derigennem fremmer et økocentrisk kulturelt imperativ.

In this paper, I explore anti-science rhetorics in the Italian public sphere vis-à-vis the peculiar, mediated context for expert and science communication that has characterized the Italian communication of Covid-19 during the pandemic. By reconstructing the events that led to a failed political attempt of muzzling the public communication of expertise in Italy, I argue that the pandemic highlighted a need, for experts engaging in public communication of science, to develop a rhetorical awareness of the contexts, platforms, and constraints of the media in which they are invited to speak to general publics. Developing this enhanced awareness of the rhetorical and argumentative contexts that they enter when they cross over from the technical and into the public sphere will help prevent the scientists’ exploitation or silencing by politics or even worse, being misunderstood by their publics––especially when they enter the public sphere via traditional mass media (like Italian TV or radio) that thrive from spectacularizing their content, or social media with its complicated attention economies. In other words, by reading this failed political attempt to muzzle the scientists, here I re-center the importance of public communication of science on the media in our contemporary democratic context and emerging post-pandemic world. Furthermore, this increased importance of science communication in the public sphere in times of Covid-19 has also created a pressing exigence for scientists and experts to enhance their rhetorical understanding of the public platforms in which their science communication appears. Learning to avoid the argumentative traps of contemporary media ecologies and knowing how to navigate mediated communication is one way the scientists can work to prevent future proposals that block their access to public media and most importantly it is one solution to improve their public communication of expertise tout court.Sommer2020+++

Next to a reasonable and wise majority of national citizens, we saw the emergence of a wave of irrationality. It showcases a fatuous sleep of reason, a fatal escape into magic, witchcraft, shamanic thinking, claiming to decipher the occult sense of reality” (CENSIS, 2021). The worrisome anti-science trends evidenced in this 2021 CENSIS report demand careful scrutiny to better understand the connections between the modes of public communication of science in Italy during the Covid-19 emergency, the political co-optation of public health issues during the pandemic, and the public understanding of science in a time of pandemic crisis. In 2021, in this context of rising public unrest, Italy saw an explosion in public anti-establishment protests and rallies targeted against: the mask mandates, the vaccines, the national lockdown, the “Green Pass” or the government pandemic policies tout court. One notable example, from October 9, 2021, is when a crowd of protesters guided by the far-right extra-parliamentary party leaders of Forza Nuova attacked and trashed the headquarters of the Italian union CGIL in Rome and also the nearby ER of the hospital Umberto I. In this paper, I explore the discourse around the political protests that culminated in the riots of October 9. Tracing the intersections of science communication and political rhetorics during Covid-19 will illustrate how anti-establishment and anti-science publics were reinforced and amplified in the public sphere by the populist right that contributed to politicize science and exploit the pandemic crisis for their political advantage. This paper carefully reads the protests in context and it also reflects on the ways the pandemic exacerbated undemocratic inclinations within the public, including receptivity to demagogic discourse and support of right-wing authoritarian attitudes and governance. Mapping out the interplay of science and politics in the Italian public sphere will enable visualizing be

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.

Through a concise overview of a series of case studies of public communication of science before and doing the Covid-19 pandemic, I will discuss a concept of “integrated ethos” for public experts. This notion of expert ethos recognizes the rhetorical citizenship of scientists as key when experts exit the technical sphere and engage laypeople in public forums. After unpacking the integrated ethos of the “scientist-citizen,” I also discuss a variety of contexts, platforms, and specific situations that can either enable or constrain the enactment of scientist-citizenship in our complex contemporary media ecologies. In doing so, I reflect on the challenges and opportunities of taking up a “scientist-activist” expert stance and I conclude by encouraging public experts to cultivate a deeper awareness of the rhetorical contexts in which they communicate to prevent both the erosion of their expert ethos and the political exploitation of their public communication in times of crisis and polarization. In short, I discuss in turn “scientist-citizens”, “scientist-activists”, and “scientist-rhetors” as useful public modes of engagement for contemporary experts, and I review the challenges and opportunities of taking up the public communication of science and expertise seriously through a series of examples that include both pre-pandemic and Covid-19 case studies.

Panel presentation during the 108th Annual Convention: Honoring PLACE: People, Liberation, Advocacy, Community, and Environment

Plenary Roundtable Presentation during the NRFK8 Conference in Orebro

This essay offers a pluralized conception of local rhetorics. The local has traditionally been conceived as the backdrop or flat surface where rhetoric/discourse is situated, or at best as a contextual dimension of rhetorical situations. The history of usage of this term––evoking a fix and inert connotation that often indicates a bounded locality or site––has contributed to its neglect as a tool for rhetorical theory, while its actual use in rhetorical praxis has proliferated in conjunction to the turn to field and site-based methodologies and practices. By drawing on fieldwork about the rhetoricity of a post-disaster locality to ground my theoretical reflections, here I offer a conceptualization of local rhetorics via multiple ontologies and ecological theories. Finally, throughout the essay, I suggest a rhetorical-topographic approach as a methodological orientation to integrate existing theoretical and methodological pathways for exploring the multiple rhetoricity of the local. Keywords: local rhetorics, space, materiality, fieldwork, in-situ methodologies

Presentation during the 20th Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America Baltimore, Maryland, May 26 - 29, 2022

Presentation during the NCA 107th Annual Convention: Renewal and Transformation, in Seattle, WA, 18-21 November 2021.

Panel Presentation during the 20th Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America Baltimore, Maryland May 26 - 29, 2022

In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the Case Studies and Issues and Methods volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.

This chapter investigates the intersections between science and activism, focusing specifically on exploring a case study situated in the overlapping space between rhetorics of science and rhetorics of resistance in contemporary public discourse. Specifically, I identify and analyse a mode of rogue resistance to populism emerging from the world of science and unfolding mostly on the Internet: ‘blasting’ posts on social media. Here, I look at Roberto Burioni’s ‘blasting’ posts targeting Italian anti-vaxxer users on Twitter and Facebook to illustrate this rhetorical antidote to pseudoscientific discourse circulating online and offline. A blastata is a social media comment or answer that can be disruptive and destructive, loud and potentially obnoxious—but also humorous or sarcastic. Depending on the context and regardless of the particular style, a blastata tends to end a social media comment feed, providing a final statement that is impossible to question: effectively it functions as a digital mic-dropping that leaves no space for rebuttal or further discussion. Scientists like Burioni have recently started blasting social media users in defense of science. Blasting is controversial as a mode of scientific communication, yet I argue that it can exemplify science’s potential in becoming a force of resistance in troubled times insofar as it has the potential to shift the attention back to science and away from pseudoscientific and populist rhetorics that disproportionately occupy the public sphere.

Presentation during the RiS7 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of Europe, "Rhetoric as Eqipment for Living" in Ghent, Belgium, 11-13 September 2019.

Panel Presentation and chairing the session "From “Scientist-Citizen” to “Scientist-Activist”: Publicly Engaged Scientists in a Post-truth Era" during the Annual 106th NCA Convention.

Roundtable Paper Presentation at the 104th National Communication Association Convention "Communication at Play" in Salt Lake City, Utah, November 8-11, 2018.