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This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange—O’Gorman draws on the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–75). As a German-born Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis for the United States, Arendt set out to defend politics from its many detractors along several key lines: the challenge of separating genuine politics from distorted forms; the difficulty of appreciating politics for what it is; the problems of truth and judgment in politics; and the role of persuasion in politics. O’Gorman’s book offers an insightful introduction to Arendt’s ideas  for anyone who wants to think more carefully

Examining how landmark trials become public dramas that shape law, culture, and collective memory.

Contemporary scholarship illustrates the law’s increasingly powerful role in American life; legal education, in turn, has focused on the problems and techniques of communication. This book addresses these interests through critical study of eight popular trials: the 17th-century trial of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, and the 20th-century trials of Scopes, the Rosenbergs, the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville Nine, John Hinckley, Claus von Bulow, and San Diego Mayor Larry Hedgecock. Such trials spark major public debates, become symbols of public life, and legitimize particular beliefs and institutions. Despite high visibility and drama, however, the popular trial has not received sufficient study as persuasive event. Lying at the intersection of the institutional practices of law and the mass media, the popular trial has confounded study according to the conventional assumptions of scholarship in both law and communication studies.

This volume defines popular trials as a genre of public communication, a genre that includes trials unusually prominent within public discourse. Further, popular trials are often characterize by special media presentations through televised coverage of the trial itself and news analysis, intense audience identification with the principal actors, and political and social consequences independent of the legal action. The essays in this volume stress the rhetorical functions of popular trials. Contributors in addition to the editor include Lawrance M. Bernabo, Barry Brummett, Celeste Michelle Condit, Juliet Dee, Susan J. Drucker, J. Justin Gustainis, Janice Platt Hunold, William Lewis, John Louis Lucaites, and Larry A. Williamson.

An ambitious look at rhetoric and psychosis that explores how communities form when society collapses

American society seems to have fractured. Common touchpoints of authority have receded in recent decades and beliefs that were once taboo are now openly shared, from neo-Nazism to occultism to conspiracy thinking. In this book, Calum Lister Matheson goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how splinter communities form in our current media environment, what keeps them together, and what they build from the ruins of shared language.

In his stirring exploration of how people communicate when old forms of authority and meaning collapse, Matheson examines far-flung groups that have departed the mainstream—Sandy Hook deniers, Appalachian serpent handlers, pro-anorexia bloggers, incels, transvestigators, pseudoscientific reactionaries, and more—and finds unexpected similarities among their many differences. Key among their parallels is the insistence that the symbols shared by each community represent a hidden truth that cannot be questioned or interpreted but is revealed through signs—words, images, videos, and texts. By documenting American fringe cultures, extremism, and the social functions of language, this book rethinks concepts like irony, psychosis, propriety, and what it means to be normal in weird times. 

In Postprocess Postmortem, Kristopher M. Lotier surveys the postprocess era-that-never-was, its end, and its after-lives. Employing cutting-edge digital research tools to track the circulation of texts and shifting scales from the global to the local and back again, he offers a revisionist history of a largely unchronicled past. From one perspective, the history of postprocess might seem to be a history of failure: what could have become The Next Big Thing in composition and writing studies during the 1990s and early 2000s never quite ascended. Today, few writing studies scholars apply the term postprocess to their own research or self-identify with a postprocess movement. And yet, as Lotier demonstrates, numerous core postprocess tenets have attained disciplinary centrality. The result: whether they admit to doing so or not, many contemporary scholars employ a postprocess vocabulary, allowing the ideas underlying this important movement/theory/period/attitude to live on.

Power Beyond Scrutiny uncovers the forces which distort and limit public debate in the media. From the misuse of politicians' expenses to recent phone hacking scandals, establishment corruption has never been more in the headlines. Yet amidst the din there have been seismic silences.

Justin Schlosberg interrogates these silences - why did a plea bargain which allowed Britain’s biggest arms company to escape bribery prosecution go almost entirely unchallenged in television news? Why did journalists routinely endorse the official explanation of how intelligence analyst David Kelly died, whilst all but ignoring mounting evidence which undermined it? Why, in 2010, did broadcasters offer an unchallenged platform to critics of Wikileaks but not its supporters?

These are some of the questions and imbalances that Schlosberg seeks to address as he explains the nature of public debate in the digital age. In doing so he uncovers a range of news blockages that are more than just accidents of a fragmented, chaotic mediascape. They are ultimately ideological forces which ensure that contestability and dissent remain within definable limits.

• A series of 210 audio recordings provides opportunities for learners to listen for key aspects of pronunciation and practice items from the book on their own. 
• Twenty-nine videos provide short explanations and visual demonstrations of many of the strategies included throughout the book. 
• Recommendations on ways to integrate digital tools into pronunciation exploration and practice provide learners and teachers with multiple ways to customize pronunciation practice to meet varied professional speaking contexts, academic goals, and personal interests.
• Practice items and exercises incorporate higher-frequency words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
• A glossary and several quick-reference charts make it easy to look up or clarify key terms and linguistic terminology or to visually review consonant and vowel charts.

Practicing Digital Activisms reframes digital activism as embodied, situated work that extends across classrooms, communities, institutions, streets, and ecosystems. It develops frameworks for studying and practicing activism in an era shaped by social media, datafication, and artificial intelligence. At the heart of the collection is a rethinking of digital activism for the twenty-first century that traces activism through networks of people, platforms, infrastructures, and material practices.

Bringing together scholars in rhetoric, writing studies, technical communication, and community engagement, contributors show how activism now unfolds across interconnected media ecologies, through affective and material infrastructures, and at multiple tempos ranging from viral moments to the quieter practices of organizing, care, and persistence. Through case studies of food activism, environmental advocacy, reproductive health, social media movements, and emerging data practices, contributors demonstrate digital activism as a sustained practice of coalition building, circulation, documentation, and persistence. The chapters provide theoretical tools for making infrastructures visible, negotiating ethical responsibility, and designing interventions responsive to local needs and broader struggles for justice.

Attending to the risks that shape contemporary digital life—including surveillance, commodification, algorithmic bias, harassment, platform control, and unequal access—the collection offers language, methods, and examples for understanding how communities build power, sustain movements, and imagine just futures through digital practice. For scholars, teachers, students, organizers, and readers interested in digital rhetoric and social change, Practicing Digital Activisms invites attention to digital participation as a vital site where collective action is imagined, contested, and practiced.

• What is Privacy Literacy?
• Protecting Privacy
• Educating about Privacy
• Advocating for Privacy

Precariously Centered confronts the troubling intersection of gender and contingency in administrative writing center work—an intersection that has haunted writing centers for decades. Featuring findings from a groundbreaking qualitative study of a diverse group of contingent women writing center administrators, Liliana M. Naydan, Maggie M. Herb, and Clint Gardner demonstrate that gender and its intersections have personal, professional, disciplinary, and pedagogical consequences in writing centers.

This report on interview-based qualitative research documents the experiences of sixteen writing center administrators—how their working lives are often complicated by the intersection of gender, contingency, and other identities. The authors address precarity, identity-based discrimination, extensive and invisible emotional labor, limited resources, lack of institutional support, and barriers to promotion. The words of these administrators come into conversation with scholarship on identity, feminist theory, and the current labor crisis in higher education and reveal challenges ranging from a dearth of resources to discrimination. Their words also reveal dire disciplinary and pedagogical consequences for our institutions and higher education.

Amid increasingly distressing labor conditions in the early twenty-first century, Precariously Centered addresses how writing center professionals—and all academics—can better address contingency, the corporatization of higher education, and the patriarchy. It emphasizes the value of discourse about working conditions, intersectional solidarity, and organizing for labor justice.

The Predator Effect concerns predatory publishing — it is the first to chart both the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The author — a scientific communications expert with 20 years’ experience — looks at how predatory journals had become an accepted part of scholarly publishing, reviewing in turn the history, development and impact of predatory journals. The book also puts their rise in context of wider issues such as Open Access and publication ethics. Other issues it addresses include: defining predatory journals, the history of predatory publishing practices, Beall’s List, authors’ motivations and the future of predatory publishing practices. 

• Background
• Characteristics and Research
• The Geopolitics of Scholarly Publishing
• Responses and Solutions 

An anthology of the most important historical sources, classical and modern, on the subjects of presumptions and burdens of proof

In the last fifty years, the study of argumentation has become one of the most exciting intellectual crossroads in the modern academy. Two of the most central concepts of argumentation theory are presumptions and burdens of proof. Their functions have been explicitly recognized in legal theory since the middle ages, but their pervasive presence in all forms of argumentation and in inquiries beyond the law—including politics, science, religion, philosophy, and interpersonal communication—have been the object of study since the nineteenth century.

However, the documents and essays central to any discussion of presumptions and burdens of proof as devices of argumentation are scattered across a variety of remote sources in rhetoric, law, and philosophy. Presumptions and Burdens of Proof: An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law brings together for the first time key texts relating to the history of the theory of presumptions along with contemporary studies that identify and give insight into the issues facing students and scholars today.

The collection’s first half contains historical sources and begins with excerpts from Aristotle’s Topics and goes on to include the locus classicus chapter from Bishop Whately’s crucial Elements of Rhetoric as well as later reactions to Whately’s views. The second half of the collection contains contemporary essays by contributors from the fields of law, philosophy, rhetoric, and argumentation and communication theory. These essays explore contemporary understandings of presumptions and burdens of proof and their role in numerous contexts today. This anthology is the definitive resource on the subject of these crucial rhetorical modes and will be a vital resource to all scholars of communication and rhetoric, as well as legal scholars and practicing jurists.