Books

Political Communication and Deliberation takes a unique approach to the field of political communication by viewing key concepts and research through the lens of deliberative democratic theory. This is the first text to argue that communication is central to democratic self-governance primarily because of its potential to facilitate public deliberation. Thus, it offers political communication instructors a new perspective on familiar topics, and it provides those teaching courses on political deliberation with their first central textbook. This text offers students practical theory and experience, teaching them skills and giving them a more direct understanding of the various subtopics in public communication.

Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood. More than a simple summary of research, the book is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to public officials, activists, and average citizens who are seeking to utilize deliberative civic engagement in their communities.

The Group in Society meets the challenges of teaching courses on small groups by revealing the full complexity of small groups and their place in society. It shows students the value of learning how to carefully study a group's history and context, rather than merely learning a fixed set of group participation skills. This text brings together disparate theories and research (from communication, social psychology, organizational and managerial studies, and sociology) in a way that helps students make sense of a complex body of scholarship on groups.

The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is a terrific resource for democratic practitioners and theorists alike. It combines rich case material from many cities and types of institutional settings with careful reflection on core principles. It generates hope for a renewed democracy, tempered with critical scholarship and political realism. Most important, this handbook opens a spacious window on the innovativeness of citizens in the U.S. (and around the world) and shows how the varied practices of deliberative democracy are part of a larger civic renewal movement.

Drawing from years of experience and study, John Gastil offers a variety of solutions to the problems commonly faced by small, democratic groups. He thoroughly explores the dynamics of practising democracy, including the relationship between speaking rights and listening responsibilities; the importance of full access to information and agenda setting; and ways to practice democracy in personal, family and neighbourhood life. Throughout, he enriches his suggestions with detailed descriptions of the dynamics within a co-operative grocery store. To help readers to choose the democratic structure most appropriate to their group, the book also surveys the full range of democratic processes -- including consensus, majority rule, and proportional outcomes.

Drawing from in-depth interviews, thousands of juror surveys, and court and voting records from across the United States, the authors show that serving on a jury can trigger changes in how citizens view themselves, their peers, and their government--and can even significantly increase electoral turnout among infrequent voters. Jury service also sparks long-term shifts in media use, political action, and community involvement. In an era when involved Americans are searching for ways to inspire their fellow citizens, The Jury and Democracy offers a plausible and realistic path for turning passive spectators into active political participants.

John Gastil challenges conventional assumptions about public opinion, elections, and political expression in this persuasive treatise on how to revitalize the system of representative democracy in the United States.

The Declaration of Independence is usually celebrated as a radical document that inspired revolution in the English colonies, in France, and elsewhere. In Enemyship, however, Jeremy Engels views the Declaration as a rhetorical strategy that outlined wildly effective arguments justifying revolution against a colonial authority--- and then threatened political stability once independence was finally achieved. Enemyship examines what happened during the latter years of the Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when the rhetorics and energies of revolution began to seem problematic to many wealthy and powerful Americans. To mitigate this threat, says Engels, the founders of the United States deployed the rhetorics of what he calls "enemyship," calling upon Americans to unite in opposition to their shared national enemies.

Individuals of all ages interact with one another, and their interactions have significance throughout their lives. This distinctive volume acknowledges the importance of these interactions and provides a life-span developmental view of communication and aging, attempting to capture the many similarities and changes that occur in people's lives as they age. The authors move the study of intergenerational contact closer to the actual participants, examining what happens within intergenerational interactions and how people evaluate their intergenerational experiences. The volume concentrates on the micro-context of the intergenerational interaction and the cognitions, language, and relationship behaviors related to intergenerational communication across the life span. The volume employs the perspective that the understanding of human behavior across the life span is enhanced by studying communicative behavior in intergenerational interaction. The authors integrate research from multiple disciplines concerned with intergenerational communication, which is framed by several unique theoretical perspectives drawn from the communication discipline. As a resource for the study of intergenerational communication across the life span, this monograph offers important insights to scholars, students, and all who are involved in intergenerational communication.

The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery.

Written by an award-winning researcher and professor whose work straddles the fields of communication and healthcare, Talking About Health explores the importance of health communication in the 21st century, and how it affects us all. Organized around six key questions about health and communication: How ‘Normal’ am I? What are My ‘Risk’ Factors? Why Don’t We Get ‘Care’? Is the Public Good ‘Good’ for Me? Who Profits from My Health? and What’s Politics Got to Do with It? Provides readers with specific tools which which to better navigate the healthcare system Translates what we know about communication and health into useful guidelines for everyday practice Includes discussions of politics and healthcare, genetic testing, and alternative care The author's blog http://whyhealthcommunication.com/whc_blog/ focuses on why communicating about health can make a difference in our health and our quality of life

Adolescent Relationships and Drug Use explores the communicative and relational features of adolescent drug use. It focuses on peer norms, risk, and protective factors and considers how drugs are offered to adolescents, examining such factors as who makes the offers and how they are resisted, where the offers take place, and what relationship exists between the persons making the offers and the persons receiving them. Unlike other studies of drug resistance, this work examines the communication processes that affect adolescents' ability to effectively resist drug offers. Michelle Miller and her colleagues study how personal qualities, communication skills, and relationships with others affect an individual's ability to resist offers of drugs.

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

Following the dramatic Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, President John F. Kennedy moved to repair the damage the invasion had done to his image and to his relations with the press. Thomas W. Benson examines two speeches and a press conference held by JFK in the days after the crisis, shedding light on how the structures of speech writing influence the texts of the speeches and policy formation, as well as the ways the press mediates and even helps to formulate presidential rhetoric.

The New Deal era is hard to define with precision—in time or in ideology. Some historians use New Deal to designate the intense period of domestic reform legislation of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, 1933–37. Others confine discussion of the era to the legislation of 1933, and identify another wave of legislation in 1935 as a Second New Deal. Most of the essays in this book focus on the prewar period, with glimpses that look forward to the rhetoric of the approach to and engagement in World War II.

The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary explores the most visible and volatile element in the 2004 presidential campaign—the partisan documentary film. This collection of original critical essays by leading scholars and critics—including Shawn J. and Trevor Parry-Giles, Jennifer L. Borda, and Martin J. Medhurst—analyzes a selection of political documentaries that appeared during the 2004 election season. The editors examine the new political documentary with the tools of rhetorical criticism, combining close textual analysis with a consideration of the historical context and the production and reception of the films.

Widely celebrated in its own time, Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address commands the regard of Americans from across the political spectrum. Delivered as the young nation found itself embroiled in bitter partisan struggles, the speech has been hailed as the Sermon on the Mount of good government.

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.

This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning offers insights into how and why public scholarship has grown and is beginning to sustain itself at Penn State University and beyond. The research and writing contained here was generated by faculty and graduate students active in Penn State's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy.

Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Biennial Conference on Argumentation

The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address is a state-of-the-art companion to the field that showcases both the historical traditions and the future possibilities for public address scholarship in the twenty-first century.

Public Speaking and Civic Engagement promotes public speaking as a vehicle for civic engagement by showing the reader how to address issues, think critically, engage in productive dialogue, formulate sound arguments, and develop an ethic of advocacy. The civic engagement theme is unique in that it envisions public speaking as a vehicle for promoting the common good, while also emphasizing its role in personal advancement and fulfillment. By using specific examples—of students, of citizens engaged in community affairs, of historic and contemporary public figures—the book teaches the reader how to address substantive issues that impact their communities at local, state, national, and international levels.

On September 3, 1919, Woodrow Wilson embarked upon one of the most ambitious and controversial speaking tours in the history of American politics: a grueling 8,000-mile, twenty-two-day tour across the Midwest and Far West in support of the League of Nations. Historians still debate Wilson’s motivations for touring in the first place, but most agree with Thomas Bailey that the tour proved a disastrous blunder. Not only did Wilson collapse before completing his swing around the circle, but the treaty likely would have been defeated even if the tour had succeeded beyond all expectations. Most agree that Wilson’s decision to tour was misguided the product of an exaggerated sense of his own persuasiveness, a martyr complex, or even mental illness.

The Progressive Era witnessed a rhetorical renaissance that changed how Americans talked about politics and society. Marking a clean break from the rhetoric of the Gilded Age, the discourse of progressivism represented a new common language of political and social analysis that was reform-oriented, moralistic, and optimistic about the future. Progressives shared a strong faith in public opinion, and they revitalized the public sphere through a variety of initiatives to encourage public discussion and empower the citizenry. Whatever their differences, Progressives believed that a democratic public, properly educated and deliberating freely, represented the best hope for America in the modern age. Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era presents twelve major studies of the discourse of progressivism, ranging from fresh interpretations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to new studies of the “working class eloquence” of Eugene Debs, the debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and the peace advocacy of Jane Addams. Other studies in this volume explore the rhetorical origins of the conservation movement and professional journalism, chart the progress of the woman suffrage crusade, and show how Progressive social thinkers planted the seeds of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s. Taken together, these essays display the remarkable diversity and vitality of the Progressive rhetorical renaissance. They show how robust democratic speech became a distinguishing characteristic of the Progressive Era.

In Listening to the Logos, Christopher Lyle Johnstone provides an unprecedented comprehensive account of the relationship between speech and wisdom across almost four centuries of evolving ancient Greek thought and teachings—from the mythopoetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle’s treatises. Johnstone grounds his study in the cultural, conceptual, and linguistic milieu of archaic and classical Greece, which nurtured new ways of thinking about and investigating the world. He focuses on accounts of logos and wisdom in the surviving writings and teachings of Homer and Hesiod, the Presocratics, the Sophists and Socrates, Isocrates and Plato, and Aristotle. Specifically Johnstone highlights the importance of language arts in both speculative inquiry and practical judgment, a nexus that presages connections between philosophy and rhetoric that persist still. His study investigates concepts and concerns key to the speaker’s art from the outset: wisdom, truth, knowledge, belief, prudence, justice, and reason. From these investigations certain points of coherence emerge about the nature of wisdom—that wisdom includes knowledge of eternal principles, both divine and natural; that it embraces practical, moral knowledge; that it centers on apprehending and applying a cosmic principle of proportion and balance; that it allows its possessor to forecast the future; and that the oral use of language figures centrally in obtaining and practicing it. Johnstone’s interdisciplinary account ably demonstrates that in the ancient world it was both the content and form of speech that most directly inspired, awakened, and deepened the insights comprehended under the notion of wisdom.

The human brain is a magnificent structure that can function to maximize our ability to lead a very long and satisfying life. Brain health and optimal engagement in older adulthood focuses on the brain as the single most important human organ as we adapt to the many challenges of the aging process. This book links brain health and family, friendship and professional relationships in older adulthood with maintaining a high quality of life well beyond the seventh and eighth decade of life. Pragmatic suggestions based upon the most recent scientific evidence are provided to help each of us maintain brain health. The importance of maintaining a balanced interactive network into older adulthood is not only dependent upon brain health but is shown to be a direct result of brain health. The three authors of this book from three distinct scientific backgrounds: life span development; clinical neuropsychology; and public health, blend their diverse perspectives into a unique understanding of successful aging that offers each reader insight in how to maximize their potential to lead a high quality of life throughout the entirety of the life span.

What is intimacy? Intimacy is . . . "warmth, satisfaction, closeness, connection, friendly, touching, caring, spiritual union, emotional union, feeling safe and secure, sharing daily lives, a sense of understanding and a patient attitude, being there for each other, being partners and a team . . . all kinda intertwined." The study of intimacy as an important ingredient in each of our lives has only recently been the focus of social scientists. Over the past twenty years however, numerous scholars have devoted their careers to documenting the nature and importance of intimate relationships across the entirety of the life span. As the nature of intimacy changes throughout our lives, it becomes important to understand what factors are helping each of us attain intimacy and change the very nature of intimacy as we age. Factors such as gender, cultural norms, interpersonal skills, and physical limitations both enhance and limit our ability to maintain intimacy. Therefore, intimacy may best be understood as a communicative process involving the constant negotiation of the level, type and physical manifestation of that intimacy. Certain communication skills that help us to maintain our close relationships can help us to understand how intimacy can be achieved in later life.

This innovative text emphasizes how communicative processes develop, are maintained, and change throughout the life span. Topics covered include language skills, interpersonal conflict management, socialization, care-giving, and relationship development. Core chapters examine specific communication processes from infancy through childhood and adolescence into middle age and later life.

This second edition of the Handbook of Communication and Aging Research captures the ever-changing and expanding domain of aging research. Since it was first recognized that there is more to social aging than demography, gerontology has needed a communication perspective. Like the first edition, this handbook sets out to demonstrate that aging is not only an individual process but an interactive one. The study of communication can lead to an understanding of what it means to grow old. We may age physiologically and chronologically, but our social aging--how we behave as social actors toward others, and even how we align ourselves with or come to understand the signs of difference or change as we age--are phenomena achieved primarily through communication experiences.

In the decade that followed the Civil War, two questions dominated political debate: To what degree were African Americans now “equal” to white Americans, and how should this equality be implemented in law? Although Republicans entertained multiple, even contradictory, answers to these questions, the party committed itself to several civil rights initiatives. When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, it justified these decisions with a broad egalitarian rhetoric. This rhetoric altered congressional culture, instituting new norms that made equality not merely an ideal, but rather a pragmatic aim for political judgments.