Leadership Standpoints

Offers a new leadership framework for the next generation of nonprofit professionals. Based on five years of data collected from the New York Community Trust Leadership Fellowship - designed to address leadership development gaps in the nonprofit sector. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Toward Robust Public Engagement: The Value of Deliberative Discourse for Civil Communication

This article explores questions about civility in the 2012 election. Through an analysis of media discussions raising the term, four themes are constructed focusing on the limitations of civility discourse. While seeking to preserve the best that civil orientations afford, I argue that adding a deliberative approach to such discourse addresses moments when civil appeals appear to be most limited. This essay finds that working between civil and deliberative constructs provides an instructive perspective for understanding the workings of and possibilities for public discourse during situations when civility rhetoric is typically raised. Relative to civil communication-and associated concepts such as dialogue and advocacy-specific norms, benefits, examples, and implications of a deliberative rhetorical vision are charted for problem-solving, public policy contexts

The Comic Counterfactual: Laughter, Affect, and Civic Alternatives

This project contributes the comic counterfactual to the critical lexicon of rhetorical studies. Using a range of examples from political comedy, this paper offers six distinguishing features and several temporal functions of this concept. I argue that the comic counterfactual invites audiences to critically reflect upon the political, social, and performative consequences of historical events by bringing affective, sensory weight to alternative visions, moving unaccountable private interests into public culture, targeting the subtle determinisms that can easily creep into communication, and creating plausible ways to reworld the status quo. I discuss the limitations of the comic counterfactual in the political economy of media and offer several conclusions for rhetorical research and practice

Communication Training’s Higher Calling: Using a Civic Frame to Promote Transparency and Elevate the Value of Services

Communication trainers can make a greater case for their work by positioning all of their training, at its highest level, within a civic frame. A civic frame raises the stakes for training components such as listening or diversity and puts the benefits of corporate social responsibility and similar efforts into practice in training contexts. This chapter details why and how trainers can use this frame to create transparency and elevate the value of their services

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Decorum: Quintilian’s Reflections on Rhetorical Humor

Abstract This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze Book 6, Chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught