Jennifer R. Mercieca

What is the Role of the Communication Discipline in Social Justice, Community Engagement, and Public Scholarship? A Visit to the CM Café

In early December of 2010, the virtual doors of the CM Cafe were swung open. Seven scholars were invited to the opening*Sarah Dempsey (University of North Carolina), Mohan Dutta (Purdue University), Larry Frey (Trinity University, University of Colorado at Boulder), Bud Goodall (Arizona State University), Soyini Madison (Northwestern University), Jennifer Mercieca (Texas A&M University), and Tom Nakayama (Northeastern University). These scholars were invited to the Cafe to join in a discussion about social justice, community engagement, and public scholarship in the communication discipline, and all were excited to bring their experiences from various areas of the discipline*organizational communication, performance studies, applied communication, communication and culture, rhetoric, health communication*to the table in a wide-ranging conversation. The CM Cafe was facilitated through a private group on Facebook and remained open for about two weeks. As scholars arrived at this virtual Cafe, they often joined the conversation with brief introductions structured by questions posted on the chalkboard overhead. But through the days, new issues were introduced, old ones revisited, and scholars, media personalities, and others outside the Cafe walls were called forth in argument and support. The invited scholars popped in and out of the Cafe as their busy schedules allowed*some were able to linger over many cups of coffee, though others just stopped by for a quick bite and some conversation. Shelly Blair and I stood behind the counter and listened, throwing in only an occasional question or comment. I think it is safe to say that we were all challenged and enlightened by our time in the Cafe*the conversations managed to strike that precarious balance of cordiality and challenge that we strive for in academic debates. In the following pages, you will be privy to some of the comments and conversations that emerged during the December 2010 opening of the CM Cafe.

A Vernacular Republican Rhetoric: William Manning's Key of Libberty

Our analysis of farmer and tavern-keeper William Mannings 1798 Key of Libberty extends the concept of American republican rhetoric to include both elite and vernacular forms. We find that the key components of Mannings vernacular republicanism are: an aggressive use of the rhetoric of critique; the demand for transparency in public argument; the rejection of elite leadership; and the belief that decisions must be made in the interest of the common good. We compare vernacular to elite republicanism and conclude that the vernacular perspective has endured in American reform rhetoric.

The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship

Invoked by advocates on all sides in recent controversies over marriage equality, police brutality, immigration, and access to contraceptives, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitu...

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, edited by Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen

The eighth and final chapter similarly addresses a release of the constraints of scientific publication, in this case provided by Internet communication. The affordances of online communication, in brief, can be expressed as increased potential for dialectic, collaboration, and virtual witnessing. Videos and scientific articles published online enable interactivity, allowing viewers to dictate the ways in which they receive, process, and respond to information. From a Heideggerian perspective, the transformations in communication brought on by the Internet are such that “scientist readers and authors can picture the same world, fully sharing the same epistemic perspective” (304). Those who study scientific communication and who are interested in the role of visualizations in scientific arguments will have much to gain from reading Gross and Harmon’s new book. Some scholars of visual persuasion might take issue with the authors’ brief dismissal of other frameworks for visual analysis, but the complexity of the framework advanced in this book opens up many opportunities for further exploration. On the whole, Gross and Harmon’s addition to science studies with this book, ambitious in its scope and meticulous in its analyses, cannot be over-estimated.

A Nation of Speechifiers: Making An American Public After the Revolution

everyone from Dale Carnegie to Tony Robbins) needs to be seen in the context of the US secularization of Protestant modes of self-improvement in the nineteenth century and beyond, just as the debates over objectivism and relativism mirror the skirmishes of the culture wars that begin at about the same time. Nonetheless, this is an important book, well researched and engagingly written, that should be on the bookshelf of anyone who thinks and writes about rhetorical theory and criticism.