Creating Sites for Reasonable Discourse Stasis in Public Deliberation

This paper presents an analysis of stasis as a means for creating common ground between conflicting parties and a guide to judgment in public deliberation. Craig‘s (1989) approach to communication as a ―practical discipline‖ provides the theoretical justification for research that examines the practical communication problems society faces. This paper examines public discourse in the form of arguments before local deliberative bodies, where people are attempting to influence the judgment of the board and the public. Using the methods of a rhetorically informed discourse analysis (see Tracy, 2001 & 2002), this paper examines the formulation, presentation, and reaction to arguments in naturally occurring public deliberation. The analysis focuses on the ways stasis provides a means of understanding, analyzing, and critiquing argument. A fundamental problem in public argument is a lack of common ground for proceeding with deliberation when opposing sides take divergent views of an issue. Stasis as a principle for public deliberation provides a way of conceiving common ground and a guide for effective public deliberation

Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future

This essay considers how the representation of deep time affects, and is affected by, literary genres. It takes The Time Machine (1895) as its case study, investigating the ways in which H. G. Wells's work repurposes the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansive temporal scales that exceed the representational capacity of the realist novel. The essay's overarching suggestion is that stretching narratives to the extreme longue durée of the geologic epoch necessitates shifting away from realism, opening new possibilities for genres (including melodrama, epic, and, in this case, romance) that the realist tradition had ostensibly superseded. Understanding how the formal expansiveness of literary genres can be mobilized strategically, it concludes, affords a critical perspective for analyzing the Anthropocene—a concept whose narrative and discursive patterns concern the contemporaneity of deep time and the present and that could itself be construed as a genre

Social acceptability of radical food innovations

Radical and disruptive innovations have always been front and center of food production. In the last centuries, and especially since the mid-1900s, societal concerns about such innovations have been increasing. It appears that consumers balance a desire for authenticity related to traditional production systems, with convenience and an ever more digital lifestyle. In the current chapter, several generic insights into how the public responds to disruptive and radical food innovations are presented. After that, we focus on the current knowledge of how the public responds to several currently emerging innovations that can roughly be divided into the search for novel proteins and the convergence of information technology and microelectronics with food production and marketing