Organizers: Tommy Bruhn (University of Copenhagen), Maria Eronen-Valli (University of Vaasa) & Lisa Villadsen (University of Copenhagen)
This workshop focuses on relations in rhetoric and rhetorical studies. The workshop is open to empirical, critical, theoretical, and meta-theoretical approaches. The workshop aims at contributing to wider Nordic networking and cooperation with scholars interested in rhetoric.
Relations in rhetoric can be approached from many perspectives. Firstly, rhetors, be they media personalities, professionals, politicians, organizations, or just people communicating in their everyday lives, need to form a relationship with their audience. The communicative tools in constructing relationships vary in accordance with rhetorical motives, the nature of communication (such as self-expressive or professional) and media. The audience may be a large, scattered, and heterogeneous group (such as in news journalism) or a more limited group (such as people of particular age group, gender, taste, profession, political alignment etc.) which places different demands on relationality.
Secondly, rhetorical practices, such as official apologies (Villadsen & Edwards eds., 2021), or positionings of rhetorical voices (Frandsen & Johansen, 2010; Bruhn, 2018; 2022; Raupp, 2019), are ways of managing social relationships in often challenging social situations, and serve wider societal purposes of normative negotiation (epideictic rhetoric).
Thirdly, rhetorical means or rhetorical tools used in any rhetorical texts are based on associations (or dissociations) of meanings. This may mean relationships between things in argumentation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca,1992 [1958]), societal and value-laden meanings of terms (McGee, 1980; Farjam et al., 2024), interdiscursive relations in texts (Eronen-Valli, 2024), multimodal text-image relationships (Anderson, 2017), or textual agency (Leff & Utley, 2004), to name but a few.
Fourthly, rhetorical scholarship is often multidisciplinary and utilizes theoretical concepts stemming from fields such as linguistics and discourse studies (e.g. Hopper, 2007; Lehti & Eronen-Valli, 2018), media studies (e.g. Pfister, 2014), or technical communication and human-computer interaction (e.g. Brock, 2019). Such interdisciplinary relations can be mutually beneficial, but often require careful considerations of both practical and theoretical compatibility.
If you are interested in relations in rhetoric from any perspective, we are looking forward to seeing your abstract. Presentations can be English or Swedish, but discussions will be in English.
References
Anderson, A. (2017). Exploring the multimodal gutter: What dissociation can teach us about multimodality. Enculturation 25. Available at: https://www.enculturation.net/exploring_the_multimodal_gutter (accessed 5 Nov 2024).
Brock, K. (2019). Rhetorical Code Studies: Discovering Arguments in and around Code. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bruhn, T. (2018). Delade meningar. Retorisk flertydighet och den pluralistiska publiken i politiska förnyelseprocesser. Ödåkra, Retorikförlaget.
Bruhn, T. (2022). Orchestrating Difference: The Address of Composite Audiences as Pluralist Rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric 55(2),177–201. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.2.0177
Eronen-Valli, M. (2024). Interdiscursive resistance by Ukrainian companies: Wartime fundraising on Kickstarter as commercial and societal rhetoric. Discourse & Communication 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241293072
Farjam, M., Bruhn, T., Gustafsson, N. & Segesten, A.D. (2024). The uses of the term polarisation in Swedish newspapers, 2010–2021. Nordicom Review 45(1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2024-0002
Frandsen, F. & Johansen, W. (2010). Crisis communication, complexity, and the cartoon affair: A case study. In T. W. Coombs, & S. J. Holladay (Eds.). The Handbook of Crisis Communication (pp. 425–448). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hopper, P.J. (2007). Linguistics and micro-rhetoric: A twenty-first century encounter. Journal of English Linguistics35(3), 236–252. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424207305307
Leff, M.C., & Utley, E.A. (2004). Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric in Martin Luther King Jr.’s ”Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7(1), 37–51. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rap.2004.0026
Lehti, L. & Eronen-Valli, M. (2018). Diskurssintutkimuksen menetelmiä digitaalisen retoriikan tutkimuksessa. AFinLA-E: Soveltavan kielitieteen tutkimuksia (11), 156–176. https://doi.org/10.30660/afinla.69104
McGee, M.C. (1980). The ideograph: a link between rhetoric and ideology. The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638009383499
Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1992 [1958]). Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Brysseli: Editions de l’université de Bruxelles.
Pfister, D.M. (2014). Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics. Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Raupp, J. (2019) Crisis communication in the rhetorical arena. Public Relations Review 45(4),101768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.04.002
Villadsen, L.S. & Edwards, J.A. (Eds.) (2021). The Rhetoric of Official Apologies: Critical Essays. Lanham: Lexington Books.