In Better Fettle: Improvement, Work and Rhetoric in the Transition to Environmental Farming in the North York Moors

Through ethnographic research amongst farmers in the North York Moors, and through broader historical and political analysis, I examine the importance and role of values in hard work and beneficent change in negotiated interactions between policy-makers, farmers and conservationists. Within the context of a shift in agricultural support away from production to environmental protection, and within the context of a local conservation initiative to protect a population of freshwater pearl mussels in the River Esk, I show the importance of these values for the construction of farmers' personhoods and their symbolic relations and means of expression through the landscape. I show how those values are persistent and pervasive, yet at the same time mutable and open to interpretation. In particular, I examine alternative conceptions of beneficent change through recourse to the words fettle and improvement. Fettling places value in long-term, steady and incremental change, whereas improvement places value in changes more closely associated with productivist ideals such as expansion and profit. I suggest that it is the mutability of farming values that gives rise to their persistence as they come to be used and reinterpreted according to the changing contexts of their application and the differing interests of a range of groups and individuals. By showing that farmers are able to uphold and express their values differently I argue that it is not so straightforward to predict farmers' responses to changing political exigencies or local conservation initiatives on the basis of homogenous values or the categorisation of farmers into defined "types". Through a rhetoric-culture approach I argue that changes in farming values through time do not merely reflect changing political interests and farmers' subsequent accommodation of them. Rather, it reflects the continued negotiation of those values between farmers and others in the play of agents and patients in the construction of personhood and the formulation of arguments. I argue that the persistence of fettling interpretations of a value in beneficent change reflects the agentive actions of farmers as it remains a useful argumentative strategy with which they can make indictments against new policy impositions and, moreover, it remains functional in guiding their practices in ways suitable to the environment in which they farm

2002-2004 Course Catalog

2002-2004 Course Catalo

Persuasive trust building in oral financial presentations: An analysis of a narrative Investor Relations genre

The aim of this study is to better understand the nature and role of oral financial presentations (OFP) in listed companies' Investor Relations (IR) communication activities. Combining existing literature from two disciplines, accounting and business communication research, it identifies two different types of OFP: On the one hand, Earnings Calls (EC) which are closely related to mandatory Earnings Releases and can be seen as 'norm-based', and on the other, Analyst Presentations (AP) which are fully voluntary. Whereas the first group of OFP or EC has been studied to some extent, the voluntary form has received little attention. The present study is thus motivated by asking why and how listed companies present themselves to the financial community voluntarily. The main reason is seen in the necessity to promote the company's shares in the competitive markets. Moreover, the existing literature on EC has regarded them as a genre but has only analyzed different detail questions in presentations held in English without providing any theoretical framework. Therefore, by combining literature from different disciplines about IR and corporate communication, the present study develops a comprehensive genre framework for companies' IR activities and shows within this framework the nature and role of OFP focusing on the AP type or OFP(AP). On the other hand, however, the framework reveals the financial community's need of trustworthy information. The question is thus how listed companies solve this dual goal, share promotion and delivering trustworthy information, in their oral presentations with the help of the strategic reputational story, the Equity Story. This empirical study analyzes 17 recorded and transcribed OFP(AP) held in two European languages, German and Finnish. In order to describe the genre context of the companies' IR efforts, two surveys and six expert interviews were also conducted and analyzed. The findings show that there is a border crossing professional financial marketing rhetoric, which is, however, combined with local rhetorical features in practice. Due to the investors' specific need of trust, also the ethics of such rhetoric is discussed, with the conclusion that in AP, the genre rules make it a shared practice and thus help to share the meaning of these presentations well within the financial community

Enacting a Path from Despair to Happiness: A Critical Analysis of the It Gets Betters Project

Rhetorical agency is critical for addressing perceived community crises, especially for marginalized populations. Rhetorical agency, as it is used in this dissertation, refers to the capacity to act in a way that is recognizable and intelligible within the context in which it is presented (Campbell, 2005; Rand, 2014). Understanding rhetorical agency in this way recognizes that its enactment involves a complex interplay between the rhetor, his/her audience, and the rhetorical conditions characterizing the discursive context. Using a social media movement, the It Gets Better Project, as a case study, I analyze the LGBT population’s strategic response to address the issue of anti-gay bullying and LGBT youth suicides. Through critical analysis, I examine the relationship between the rhetorical goal of a marginalized population and the use of a particular Internet technology to address a situation that seemed urgent and uncertain. Specifically, I argue that drawing upon the enactment of lived experiences in the form of personal video testimonies creates discursive possibilities and limitations for rhetorical agency particular to the rhetorical situation in which it emerges

Campus Medius

Campus Medius explores and expands the possibilities of digital cartography in cultural and media studies. Simon Ganahl documents the development of the project from a historical case study to a mapping platform. Based on the question of what a media experience is, the concepts of the apparatus (dispositif) and the actor-network are translated into a data model. A time-space of twenty-four hours in Vienna in May 1933, marked by a so-called »Turks Deliverance Celebration« (Türkenbefreiungsfeier), serves as an empirical laboratory. This Austrofascist rally is mapped from multiple perspectives and woven into media-historical networks, spanning from the seventeenth century up to the present day

2000-2002 Course Catalog

2000-2002 Course Catalo

Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication

In the digital age, the transformation process of information into ‘knowledge’ is characterized by hyper-connected communities, where a potentially infinite amount of information is ubiquitously accessible to individuals or community users and is instrumental in the creation of shared knowledge, but also in building consensus across community participants, societal membership and grouping, through the argumentative ideological representation of assumptions, values and practices. This Special Issue of “Lingue e Linguaggi” on the theme Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication explores the interface between these three dimensions and combines an array of perspectives into a distinctly unified volume, offering synchronic, diachronic, comparative, interlinguistic and intercultural approaches over a range of specialized knowledge domains. The volume integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches, making use of Corpus Linguistics, alongside other methods incorporated in theoretical approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory and Argumentation Theory, focusing on the pragma-linguistic features of different texts and genres, together with their ideological purposes for different audiences in various contexts of use. The collection of essays investigates argumentative styles and patterning along with the discursive socio-construction of ideology in the dynamics of recontextualization, rescripting and remediation which affect the multi-faceted nature of contemporary communication

Russell Kirk and the Rhetoric of Order

The corpus of historically-minded man of letters and twentieth century leader among conservatives, Russell Amos Kirk, prompts one to reflect upon a realist rhetoric of order for conservative discourse in particular and public argumentation in general. In view of building a realist rhetoric of order within the present spectrum of modern to postmodern thought, this dissertation project contains two related layers of study. At one level, the author both builds and departs from the realist approach to communicative epistemology known as rhetorical perspectivism toward a theoretical framework for the study of rhetoric that is based upon Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas\u27s legacy of classical realism. At another level, in light of the significance of Russell Kirk for the question of conservatism and postmodernism, from the vantage point of realism, the author considers Kirk\u27s view on imagination, language, and life as against certain aspects of Hans Georg Gadamer\u27s philosophical hermeneutics. This comparison, next to a rhetorical theoretical study of The Roots of American Order regarding the essential constancy of human nature as such through history, points to some avenues by which Kirk\u27s imaginative standpoint provides a way of taking the imagination as formative of communicative perspectives within and across rhetorical situations. For conservative discourse and beyond, within this age of epistemological skepticism and moral relativism, Kirk\u27s corpus provides for some ethical prospects for persuasion in terms of both argument and narrative, inclusive of the natural law as a basis for rhetorical ethics. In establishing parameters for a realist rhetoric of order, the author relies upon the work of Richard M. Weaver, who contributed to both movement conservatism and rhetorical theory during the twentieth century. In particular, the author embraces Weaver\u27s connecting of genuine conservatism to philosophical realism, notwithstanding some necessary correctives toward classical realism regarding reality and ideation. Although this project in large part operates within the realm of rhetorical theory, some implications for the practice, criticism, and pedagogy of rhetoric are highlighted along the way with respect to a realist rhetoric of order