Browsing by Subject "public sphere"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    The Context of Democratic Discourse: Deliberation and Debate in Online Discussion Spaces
    (2023) Pharris, Mark
    Political talk can take on many different forms and occur in many different contexts. Throughout this dissertation, I examine how and why political talk occurs in specific online settings. In the process, my investigations can shed light on the nature of political talk in general. In Chapter 2, “Democracy, Technology, and Mediated Speech,” I provide a literature review and intellectual history of the role mass media plays in shaping democracy. In Chapter 3, “Newspaper Comment Sections and The Deliberative Potential of Online Spaces,” I examine how online news commenters organize conversation and debate. In Chapter 4, “r/Minneapolis and Framing Online Political Speech,” I investigate how forum users evoke various senses of locality to frame political speech. Finally, in Chapter 5, “Twitter and Semantic Territorialization,” I discuss how social media platforms lend themselves to the strategic manipulation and dissemination of political discourses. Throughout my analysis of virtually mediated communication I reveal how virtual speech frameworks necessarily require a series of compromises and metonymies, which can have a significant impact on the type and tenor of political talk involved. Combined, and in the absence of further efforts to establish locality and co-presence, these frameworks tend to produce fragmentary speech and limited forms of engagement. Productive political talk can only flourish when speakers recognize each other as stakeholders and embrace a common means of at least potentially reaching consensus. Virtual spaces that are deliberately set up as more intimate and communal—coffee houses rather than vast public squares—are vital in encouraging this local sense of politics. Ultimately, the internet is a triumph for democracy in terms of significantly reducing the barrier for entry in the political arena, bringing diverse audiences together in conversation, and undermining the influence of the state and other powerful institutions as gatekeepers. But these are necessary rather than sufficient conditions for realizing the deliberative ideal and nurturing civil solidarity. The nature of the forum, the medium of communication, and the mode of interaction can either encourage or discourage various forms of public engagement, but civil society remains an event that must be accomplished and re-accomplished by people.
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    Critical Community Literacy: Looking With Local Resistance
    (2018-05) Puett, Sarah
    This dissertation considers the relationship between literacy and activism in the public sphere. In the fall of 2016 I participated with a local racial justice organization where I took part in a series of public meetings. Focused on alternative means of public safety, the meetings were planned in response to local state violence—multiple incidents of police shooting and killing Black community members—as well as the broader interlocking systems of oppression which fail to protect people of color. This study exhibits how one decentralized organization helps establish critical literacy in a segregated urban area, better known for its progressive politics than its proclivity for lethal state violence. These meetings warrant a more complex, critical frame than community literacy scholarship currently provides. Drawing on both literacy and rhetorical studies, my analysis reveals the ways in which literacy events represent a type of intervention, and in this case, serve to disrupt mythic timelines. During the events, I contend, local Black organizers occupy and transgress the role of a literacy sponsor by calling on their (kn)own experiences with racial oppression. My analysis nuances the relationship between literacy events and practices, and in turn, I offer a series of dialectics for participant-observation in community literacy studies. I hope to establish precedent for speaking more plainly about racism and whiteness in community literacy scholarship, and to challenge the dominant notion that community literacy projects are categorically just. Looking With Local Resistance signals that if we participate as activists in communities outside the academy, we must do so as reflexively and sustainably as we do critically.