Unruly Rhetorics: Protest Persuasion and Publics (Composition Literacy and Culture)

About this book

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric communication and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism political protest and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancire and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of unruliness in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical political and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression embodied print digital and sonic Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity is constitutive of the political itself.