Ellen W. Gorsevski

Muhammad Ali's Fighting Words: The Paradox of Violence in Nonviolent Rhetoric

While Muhammad Ali has been the subject of countless articles and books written by sports historians and journalists, rhetorical scholars have largely ignored him. This oversight is surprising given both the tradition of social movement scholarship within rhetorical studies and Alis influential eloquence as a world renowned celebrity espousing nonviolence. Alis rhetorical performances played a pivotal role in radicalizing the civil rights movement as it (d)evolved into twin forces: Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements. Alis rhetoric conjoins messages of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, enabling critics to re-envision civil rights texts. Alis enduring rhetoric provides a model for analyzing texts and social movements invoking the paradox of the violence in nonviolent civil disobedience.

Wangari Maathai's Emplaced Rhetoric: Greening Global Peacebuilding

This article offers new insights into how Wangari Maathais rhetoric of emplacement may be productively understood as a growing form of postcolonial communication, which is amenable to criticism and theory-building in rhetorical studies. Maathais emplaced rhetoric (ER) addressed postcolonial oppressions while emphasizing peacebuilding. ER is a form of postcolonial symbolic and discursive message-making found in a variety of communication contexts, often political, intercultural, and international exchanges about the environment. Prevailing literature on environmental communication features rhetorics that relate to colonial caused inequities, but little has been discussed in terms of connecting peacebuilding rhetoric of African womens leadership to environmental sustainability. ER functions as a heuristic move to restore agency, interconnection and wholeness of sentient beings and ecosystems within the postcolonial context; it is the peacebuilders transcendence over dominant discourses that normalize displacement and fragmentation. This rhetorical analysis of recent texts of Maathai as a major peacebuilder in environmental and social justice activism serves as an antidote to the gap in contemporary criticism of postcolonial and environmental confluences in communication.

The Rhetorical Plasticity of the Dead in Museum Displays: A Biocritique of Missing Intercultural Awareness

Using rhetorical analysis in the form of an autoethnographically informed biocritique, this study applies and expands the concept of rhetorical plasticity to examine the popular museum exhibit Bodies: The Exhibition, which is arguably the most controversial of a series of contemporary museum exhibits that feature deceased human bodies that have been plasticized and entertainingly displayed for public viewing in museums in cities worldwide. We investigate how rhetorical tropes, such as biological and health discourses that pleasantly effuse reason, and fun action poses, operate synergistically to invite audiences into a forgetting of cultural awareness and personal biography in exhibits that display unknown Chinese bodies to Western audiences.

The language of peace: communicating to create harmony

In The language of peace: communicating to create harmony, author Rebecca L. Oxford provides a sweeping and expansive overview of the ways that understanding structures of violence can serve as mea...

Teaching students how to publish communication research

ABSTRACT Courses: This semester-long assignment can be featured in undergraduate or graduate communication courses that include a major writing assignment such as research methods, capstone classes, senior thesis sections, or advanced courses on topics such as interpersonal, intercultural, and interracial communication. This assignment is suitable for face-to-face, online, and blended courses. Objectives: By completing this assignment, students should be able to (a) outline and draft a full research paper or comprehensive literature review on a course-related topic, (b) tailor their papers to meet the requirements of an editor’s call for papers, (c) peer review and provide constructive feedback on classmates’ scholarly papers, and (d) revise and resubmit their original research papers to a mock journal.