Michael Huspek

On withholding political voice: An analysis of the political vocabulary of a “nonpolitical” speech community

This analysis attempts to identify and explain some underlying rationales for the withholding of citizen voice from the democratic political arena. Of special interest are the ways in which such rationales are located in speakers’ everyday political words and meanings. For support, this analysis examines the political vocabulary of lumber‐industrial workers who claim to know virtually nothing about politics and to detest what little they do know about it. Contrary to scholars who commonly treat those who withhold their voice from the democratic political arena as individual cases, this analysis of the workers’ vocabulary of politics shows the withholding of voice to be an active choice grounded in community‐based meanings that are discursively produced in ongoing interactions within the speech community.

Oppositional codes: The case of the penitentiary of New Mexico riot

Abstract Understanding of the 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico can be improved by emphasizing how language congealed into two distinct codes—one belonging to inmates, the other to prison administrators—that provided their respective users with diametrically opposed views of the world and ways of acting upon it. A code‐based analysis of the riot attempts to overcome some of the shortcomings of both agency‐based and structuralist accounts by stressing the dynamics of agency and structure within code opposition. By so doing, the analysis offers critical diagnostic tools for communication analysts and conflict mediators who may be called upon to intervene in social situations where agents appear to be locked intractably in oppositional conflict.

Habermas and Oppositional Public Spheres: A Stereoscopic Analysis of Black and White Press Practices

Drawing upon Jürgen Habermass discourse-based theoretical approach, this article argues that his thesis regarding the bourgeois public sphere needs to be redirected so as (1) to show how sources of communicative action may have dried up within the bourgeois public sphere and (2) to explore real emancipatory alternatives that spring up as oppositional voices of subaltern groups, oriented to understanding, and expressed in contexts wherein peoples upward struggles against power and domination have not yet been completed. In support of the argument, a stereoscopic analysis is conducted that focuses on public sphere practices and counter-practices – specifically those of The New York Times as exemplar participant of bourgeois publicness and the black-owned and operated New York Amsterdam News as its oppositional counterpart.

Book review essays

Derek Roger and Peter Bull (Eds.), Conversation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1989. Kathryn Woolard, Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Patricia Noller and Mary Anne Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Perspectives on Marital Interaction. Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters, Ltd., 1988. David Crookall and Danny Saunders (Eds.)? Communication and Simulation: From Two Fields to One Theme. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, Ltd., 1988.