The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Albma Rhetoric Cult & Soc Crit)

The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Albma Rhetoric Cult & Soc Crit)

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0817354395

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Essays in the The Prettier Doll focus on the same local controversy: in 2001,a third-grade girl in Colorado submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white Barbie. When the student’s experiment was banned an uproar resulted that spread to the national media. School board meetings and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science, racism, and tensions in foundation values such as liberty, democracy, and free speech.
 
For the authors of these essays, the exchanges that arose from “Barbiegate” illustrate vividly the role of rhetoric at the grassroots level, fundamental to civic judgment in a democratic state and at the core of “ordinary democracy.”

 

Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement

Contemporary Theories of Liberalism: Public Reason as a Post-Enlightenment Project (SAGE Politics Texts series)

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

The Myth of Digital Democracy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strains of social-political thought that inform so much of contemporary work within media, cultural, and rhetorical studies especially, we should ask what remains invisible inside such visions of public participation in an actually existing, if always effervescent, civil society and multi-institutional order. Perhaps these repressed elements can be clarified by bringing alternative perspectives to bear on the norms of ordinary democratic culture and the rhetorical interactions that constitute it.

Similarly, they endorsed multiculturalism but not necessarily at the price of repudiating Western culture’s (Eurocentric?) commitments to universal human rights. e. Liberals were at a loss to explain the persistence through the 1990s of race-related problems that had resisted their best efforts at ameliorating them. Some problems were largely confined to the inner city, but others knew no boundaries: the persistence, for example, of academic achievement gaps across socioeconomic classes and age.

Values.3 To Burke, the event may be reductive, but its rhetorical scope is telematic. Murray Edelman would add that the language of public proceedings is generally hortatory; “[t]he conclusions [of a hortatory style], being promises or threats, amount to appeals for public support.”4 The promises and threats so characteristic of a hortatory style suggest that a public proceeding always is about more than its explicit subject matter; it is also about constructing public support and understanding.

Cruz’s epilogue to explore the individual, educational, and ultimately social-political aspects of positive race relations as they ought to be pursued by students, educational professionals, parents, and even state-level governmental agencies. Before we consider the dramatic form—one that I will identify technically as a romance—let us look to the other face of the drama, its emotional demeanor. Structures of Feeling The phrase “structures of feeling” is identified most closely with British.

Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press. 92 / Gronbeck cause we take a step back does mean we’ve uh we’ve we’ve finished and we can’t keep moving forward.” (3) The board, therefore, should hold a symposium on the issue to “be aware of our own stereotypes and our own ways that we operate and and be able to move.

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