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1.
Weeding or deselection of materials has become an integral part of library management. Based on a nineteen-question survey about weeding practices in public libraries, this article discusses the personal perspectives of public librarians on weeding as well as the weeding practices of their institutions. The three most common criteria for weeding are circulation, physical condition, and accuracy of information. Librarians overwhelmingly believe that weeding increases use of books and patron satisfaction. In addition, the public library was framed as a venue that offers safe, clean, and fresh “product lines” with various natural life cycles and expiry dates. This discursive formation raises questions about the extent to which public libraries and their collections are becoming commodified, homogenized, and ephemeral, and whether such ephemeralness and homogenization serve the interests of all community members.  相似文献   

2.
Experts play important roles in supporting public deliberation. These roles include developing and vetting background materials, participating in question-and-answer sessions with citizens, and giving pubic presentations. Rarely, though, are experts asked to be on hand during deliberative forums, whereby they have the opportunity to interact with deliberating groups. The inclusion of experts during forums presents a tension because, although they can elevate the quality of the conversation by correcting factual errors, they can also, perhaps unknowingly, crowd out and silence citizen, or “nonexpert,” participation. Careful consideration of communication design can help public deliberation practitioners manage this tension so that experts, when involved in forums, enhance rather than undermine the deliberative process. Taking communication as design, we analyze the interaction of an invited expert at a water scarcity forum in Northern Colorado who derailed discussion and hindered dialogue by “going rogue.” We then turn to stasis theory to conceptualize the effective inclusion of technical experts in public deliberations. Through forum design and training practices, we propose that experts can help resolve issues of conjecture and definition in a manner that frees deliberating groups to discuss substantive and subjective issues of quality and policy.  相似文献   

3.
In health-communication research, participants who are disproportionately affected by health disparities are often “hard-to-reach,” making them difficult to identify for formative research. This study used communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to create a strategy for locating a specific subset of residents—those who use 911 for healthcare—within a low-income Atlanta community. Findings suggest the need for strategies that involve employing both the communication channels that are part of the neighborhood storytelling network and the community's discursive spaces, more specifically the communication hot spots and community comfort zones located within the community's built environment.  相似文献   

4.
Normative and practical accounts of deliberative democracy cite open-mindedness as a key feature of good deliberation. Yet scholars have often focused on attitude change or self-report measures to empirically demonstrate openness. This paper draws on grounded practical theory to understand openness as a discursive stance in public deliberation. Openness is used to address four practical problems encountered in deliberation: disagreement, opinion formation, dysfunctional community problem-solving, and deliberative sense making. Indicating openness and expressing attitude change are different discursive practices. Expecting participants to refrain from forming opinions before deliberation may be naïve. Instead, participants’ eagerness to make sense of deliberation by invoking shared understanding and openness should be used to develop meta-consensus.  相似文献   

5.
This article undertakes a critical comparison of contemporary personalization practices on Web platforms such as YouTube and Facebook with long-established practices of narrowcasting. Though such platforms appear to adhere to goals of universality similarly adhered to by public service broadcasting (PSB), the implementation of personalization on these platforms proves problematic to their discursive positioning as free “public” services. Furthermore, though public service broadcasters have embraced personalization in the name of pluralism, critics suggest that the narrowcasting inherent in personalization exists in tension to PSB's enduring commitments. Finally, the article argues that system-initiated personalization negates the “consumer sovereignty” that narrowcasting has traditionally mobilized.  相似文献   

6.
Policy debate about global warming has been framed in the public sphere in the manner of most political topics, as a matter of “skeptics” and “supporters,” making it very difficult for many US publics to know what to believe. This essay critically reads a preeminent public policy debate—that of global warming—with a twofold purpose. I first array the extensive commercial and political efforts to manipulate public information about global warming in order to illustrate that this debate is a “disingenuous” or “pseudo-controversy,” which can be seen in the asymmetrical resources, motives, and authority behind the scenes. Second, I ask what institutional and discursive conditions have enabled this moment, in which the ideals of academic freedom and protocols of scientific inquiry hold precarious authority in the public arena, and argue that contemporary critical perspectives on knowledge and truth have been co-opted in public discourse, making it more difficult to intervention in commercial and political efforts to obfuscate and mislead US publics.  相似文献   

7.
Research has neglected a critical factor in promoting successful citizen deliberation: the public forum facilitator. The facilitators create the discursive framework needed to make deliberation happen while setting the tone and the tenor for how and what participants discuss. This essay brings facilitators more clearly into the discussions about deliberative practice by offering an expanded and nuanced notion of facilitation in action. I modify D. Ryfe's continuum of involvement concept to outline three distinct types of facilitators: passive, moderate, and involved. Using this continuum, I investigate how the various moves, types of talk, and discursive strategies used by each of these facilitators differ during six National Issues Forums style deliberations. Results demonstrate that facilitators are not neutral, inactive participants in deliberative forums. The analysis indicates that the pedagogical choices made by facilitators about their involvement in forums affect deliberative talk and trajectories. Scholars evaluating deliberation should take into account facilitation and its different dimensions.  相似文献   

8.
Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years ranks as one of the most successful public television documentaries ever produced. Although it originally aired in 1987, the series has since been shown widely in school and college classrooms, where it arguably has influenced many students’ understanding of the civil rights struggle and, more fundamentally, of the nature and form of “social movement” itself This essay draws upon Kenneth Burke's concept of “significant form” to examine how the documentary's design works to shape public memory of the civil rights struggle as a social movement. In addition to yielding insight into the rhetorical structure of a landmark television documentary, the analysis of form in Eyes on the Prize illumines how public consciousness of “social movement” can be created and perpetuated through narrative form.  相似文献   

9.
During the 1930s, news media constructed celebrities as individuals whose public lives naturally reflected (or expressed) their private lives. Paul Robeson, however, offered an intriguing challenge to such seamlessness, foreshadowing contemporary evocations of celebrity that highlight the fabricated nature of public personas. I posit that during the 1930s, the discursive formations of scandal and movie stardom challenged celebrity seamlessness by constructing Paul Robeson as a site of extra-textuality: Paul Robeson “the artist” became detached from Paul Robeson “the man.” Although mired in essentialism, Robeson's extra-textuality was crucial to his activism, for it ultimately created the space from which he voiced his most impassioned political polemics. Thus both regressive and liberatory, the discourses of scandal and movie stardom mediated Paul Robeson's transition from spiritual-singing aesthete to outspoken political activist.  相似文献   

10.
This essay addresses why Rosie O'Donnell's “coming out” as a lesbian, as a gay parent, and as an advocate for gay adoption generated such little and lukewarm response, arguing that O'Donnell's lesbianism was rationalized in the public discourse by powerful preexisting narratives that constructed her as both maternal and childlike. These narratives converged with the narrative alterity of O'Donnell's homosexuality in such a way as to sharpen and strengthen established heteronormative discursive margins. The O'Donnell case contributes to an understanding of how dominant narratives negotiate competing narratives of resistance and offers an opportunity to examine mediated representations of “coming out.”  相似文献   

11.
The business case for diversity—the practice of connecting human differences to an organization's bottom line—has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using humor. By identifying these alternatives, this analysis seeks to decrease consultants' dependence on the business case when meeting occupational demands and consequently mitigate the negative effects that scholars have attributed to its common use and consequent discursive dominance in diversity work. Additionally, the conclusions suggest that diversity professionals and scholars might more explicitly use the notion of “discursive merger” to advocate for social change in organizations.  相似文献   

12.
Digital technologies have reconfigured how active community members know about local news. Sampling one Midwest community's most engaged citizens—collectively, a “community of practice”—this research formalizes one emerging media-information repertoire around the issue of homelessness. Components of this repertoire include motivations, structuring conditions, norms of usage, and perceived consequences for media-source selection. Commenting, sharing, and other information exchange become “acts of news” for individuals involved in communities of practice. Through shared information-exchange practices, citizens can not only advocate their social causes but also reinvigorate their own affiliations to the community of practice and to the city itself. The use of this media repertoire by these individuals reconstitutes and amplifies their role in the pursuit of fostering a civil society focused on homelessness. The findings illuminate the process of how community activists work as an informal organizational form and, as a result, build a stronger commitment to civic action.  相似文献   

13.
Critics have hailed West Side Story as both a masterpiece and a caricature of Puerto Rican culture. However, the perspectives of everyday Puerto Ricans are largely missing from the discourse. Therefore, this audience reception study approaches a group of young Puerto Rican women as cultural readers to learn their interpretations of West Side Story as a reflection of their standpoint and the film's current cultural relevance. The participants rejected Natalie Wood's Maria for being “insufficiently” Puerto Rican, while identifying with the “America” scene because it reflected their own gendered tensions. Their readings acknowledged the caricatures, yet validated West Side Story as a cultural text with modern-day relevance, though less so than with previous generations of Puerto Ricans.  相似文献   

14.
Emmanuel Levinas writes of how the “call of conscience”; is a “primordial discourse”; that “interrupts”; the routines and language‐games that help organize and give meaning to a person's everyday existence. Levinas thus provides a way of thinking about the relationship between the call of conscience and rhetoric that advances what rhetorical theorists have so far claimed about this relationship. This essay develops the position that the call of conscience is a rhetorical interruption in its purest form. A case study is offered to illustrate how such an interruption manifests itself in the debate over the justifiability and social acceptability of physician‐assisted suicide. The specific rhetorical transaction in question occurred in cyberspace and lasted five months; it began when members of a disability civil rights group known as “Not Dead Yet!”; conducted what their opponents described as an “invasion”; of an electronic mailing list operated by the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization.  相似文献   

15.
The rhetorical practice of consciousness‐raising has changed since communication theorists first began to apply its functions and style, as a small group, face‐to‐face practice, in the early 1970s. In this essay, we argue that in feminist activism and theory, the practice of consciousness‐raising has evolved in response to shifting cultural conditions. Our examination of consciousness‐raising rhetoric produced by self‐labeled “third wave” feminists reveals how contemporary social contexts have generated different rhetorical problems and discursive responses for feminists. Specifically, we show how third wave feminist consciousness‐raising instills a critical perspective that focuses on personal and social injustices. We argue that these rhetorical responses raise consciousness in the public sphere, through mass media, popular culture, and college classrooms, fostering both public and private dialogue about gender inequities that aims at self‐persuasion.  相似文献   

16.
Using the lens of Relational Dialectics Theory, this study sought to uncover how competing U.S. cultural financial discourses are negotiated in people’s everyday conversations with their romantic partner. The investigation uncovered that in multiple and varied ways, participants understood money to be a major source of tension in their romantic relationships. One overarching discursive struggle animated participants’ financial talk with their partners: “money is everything” versus “money isn’t everything.” Within this struggle, participants communicatively negotiated the cultural value of money in an attempt to marginalize its power and potential negative influences on relational and economic well-being. Although money is critical in helping people meet their basic needs, this study suggests that deemphasizing the importance of money as all-consuming and omnipotent has the potential to alter couples’ financial and relational well-being.  相似文献   

17.
This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying “Rabbit” as “white trash,” a discursively “dark” (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to raced and gendered struggles. Through real and symbolic violence, Rabbit battles “dark” villains and grapples with “dark” women, initiating a rite of passage. The film grounds Eminem's hip hop authenticity in Rabbit's discursive darkness, but attaches to this image the marketable allure of mythic whiteness. I conclude by contemplating how the film's conservatism reifies “blackness.”  相似文献   

18.
The media-saturated nature of everyday life is well acknowledged in current audience research, but the role of journalism for people living in this digitalised environment remains less clear. To provide a better understanding of the role of journalism and news in everyday life, this article states the case for combining two complementary analytical perspectives in cultural audience research that draw on the framework of practice theory. We need to focus on both interpersonal communication practices within social networks and on discursive practices and patterns of how people use the media. Empirically, this article draws on an extensive audience study conducted in Finland, whose findings provide a cause for moderate optimism regarding the sustaining relevance of journalism in people's everyday life in the digital era. Firstly, social networks—both offline and online—constitute a vital structure within which the output of journalism is rendered meaningful by users. Secondly, the discursive practices applied by the participants emphasise the importance of news as a central means of orientation to society and making sense of the political nature of the public world. However, much of this potential remains unknown to journalists because users' activities occur at a distance from journalism and political institutions, which poses a challenge to digital journalism.  相似文献   

19.
Museums today grapple with the reconciliation of traditional models of authority with the expectation to incorporate new voices in cultural interpretation. At the same time, society is increasingly empowered by a social Web that provides collaboration, connectivity, and openness. This paper frames the dialogue of authority and openness around parallel theories within the museum and technology communities, offering Wikipedia as a platform for facilitating new perspectives in collaborative knowledge‐sharing between museums and communities. Expanding on the metaphors of the museum as “the Temple and the Forum” and the Web as “the Cathedral and the Bazaar,” this essay argues that issues of democratization, voice, and authority in museums can be addressed through Wikipedia's community, process, and its potential as a model for a new Open Authority in museums.  相似文献   

20.
《Communication monographs》2012,79(4):380-394
Among “corporate rhetors,” none has been regarded as more creative and aggressive than Mobil Oil. This essay examines Mobil's use of “Observations"—half‐page Sunday newspaper magazine section ads—during the years of 1976–1980. The first focus is upon “Observations” as epideictic discourse developed in response to Mobil's 1975 rhetorical situation. Attention is then turned to examples of the discourse itself and a summary of 149 “Observations.” Following the analysis are treatments of the identificational strategies used by Mobil and the Promethean myth which gives those strategies universal appeal. Finally, Mobil's “epideictic advocacy” is evaluated by the standards of effect, ethics, and art. Through “Observations” Mobil intends to be—like the Sunday newspaper—a part of America's afternoon.  相似文献   

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