Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

To understand how jokes have functioned as part of U.S. presidents' strategic communication, this project examined every available White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD) speech over the last century, documenting various presidents' approaches to humor. I argue that the ability to talk about difficult or taboo subjects through jokes' deeply enthymematic ways of communicating has offered presidents expanded rhetorical spaces during crises, providing insights into why they started using humor with such routine frequency. Working with multiple factors shaping the modern presidency, presidents have used the elastic and inventive nature of enthymematic joking in attempts to move pressing issues outside immediate lines of criticism. The use of jokes in presidential communication is charted through three periods of WHCD. Several implications are drawn from this analysis, including the risks of humor as a rhetorical strategy.

In February 2020, French president Emmanuel Macron invited all interested European states to a "strategic dialogue" on the supposed contribution of France's nuclear arsenal to European collective security. While certain media commentators relayed Macron's intervention with approbation and excitement, framing the proposal as an exciting new idea that, if implemented, might boost Europe's clout on the world stage, the dominant reaction was one of ennui. After all, the argument for Euro-nukes is far from new. In fact, several (mostly French) actors have unsuccessfully attempted to persuade European policymakers of the necessity of European nuclear weapons cooperation for more than half a century. In this article, we investigate the history, merits, and longevity of the case for European nuclear arms. Drawing on secondary literature, policymakers' writings, and two hitherto untapped surveys of European public opinion conducted by one of the authors, we argue that the case for Euro-nukes is critically flawed with respect to security, strategic autonomy, futurity, and democratic good governance. We maintain that the continuous resurfacing of the "zombie" case for Euro-nukes is made possible by powerful organisational interests, as well as conceptual reversification resulting in enduring contradictions between nuclear vulnerabilities and claims of protection and autonomy. ARTICLE HISTORY

Comparative political scientists have sought to remedy their subdiscipline’s structuralist tendencies by paying greater analytical attention to transformative political events. Yet, our conceptual understanding of events remains rudimentary. The article addresses this conceptual gap in two ways. First, it foregrounds symbolic meaning-making as the constitutive attribute of events. Second, it demonstrates that events are not inherently agency-facilitating by developing the concept of prospectively framed events. These are occurrences that actors know will take place, but of whose outcome they are uncertain. Political challengers frame the upcoming event so as to discursively trap incumbents into political action they would rather not undertake. The article demonstrates this process by tracing the conflict between secessionist challengers and political incumbents within the Catalan nationalist movement between 2006 and 2010. The concluding section discusses the causal implications of the argument.

This essay identifies and explicates a key rhetorical form-"redemptive exclusion"-underlying former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley's efforts to defend barring Syrian refugees from American soil. Through a reliance on ethotic prolepsis, the rhetorical form of redemptive exclusion enables the creation of a transcendent perspective that reconciles seemingly opposite contemporary cultural and political rhet-orics: xenophobic discourses of exclusion become coarticulated with the mythic promise of an America open to all. We show how Haley's rhetoric combines antithetical gestures of inclusion and exclusion by interweaving synecdochic narratives of her own immigrant history; hyperbolic narratives of American benevolence toward immigrants; and stereotypical narratives of terrorist identity that preempt the acceptance of Syrian refugees as even potentially American. We argue that Haley converts the rejection of Syrian refugees from American soil into an opportunity for constraining and qualifying the mythic ideal of the United States as an historical beacon for immigrants around the globe. In the conclusion, we suggest that a close study of how redemptive exclusion takes life in Haley's discourse offers more general lessons about the rhetorical and ideological character of controversies over U.S. immigration policy. NOOR GHAZAL ASWAD is a doctoral candidate at the University of Memphis. ANTONIO DE VELASCO is an associate professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis.

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.

Frederick Douglass spoke to a multiracial public sphere by engaging in "antagonistic cooperation" with white and black abolitionists. He served as an "integrative ancestor" for all those trying to help build a multiracial democracy. Douglass'  interracial rhetoric was developed to engage the different constituents of his multiracial audiences. I examine some rhetorical strategies Douglass employed in his "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” speech order to communicate with the different constituents of his multiracial audience. Since many of these strategies were derived from Bible stories and
Enlightenment/ "natural rights" philosophy, I  focus on the  streams of Christian and political egalitarianism which fed Douglass' vision, with three main goals:
1) to give a sense of Douglass' stature in his own time;
2) to deepen our understanding of Douglass' biracial identity and political philosophy, and of how this makes him an "integrative ancestor"; and
3) to illustrate the continuing timeliness of Douglass' critique of American racialism.

Binary communications represent the world as a place of polar opposites. Such conceptions of reality, although not uncommon in Western thought, take on a heightened importance when political leaders employ them in a concerted, strategic discourse in a mass media environment. With this in mind, this research offers a conception of binary discourse and uses this as a foundation to examine (a) the use of binaries by U.S. President George W. Bush in 15 national addresses, from his inauguration in January 2001 to commencement of the Iraq War in March 2003, and (b) the responses of editorials in 20 leading U.S. newspapers to the president's communications.

Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.
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Reviews:

Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191.

Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374.

Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272.

Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372.

Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66.

This project examined comedic representations of US Vice President Joe Biden to analyze persona rhetoric in a media environment filled with circulating personae, or the many roles both created by and attributed to such figures. While sometimes supportive of the politician's intended roles, we found that circulating personae can disrupt the first persona, complicate the invitations and control exerted over the second persona, propel strategic and non-strategic authorships deflecting or silencing a third persona, and provide an undertow of multiple meanings supplementing a fourth persona. Several implications are drawn, including how circulating personae may neuter roles important to political rhetoric and public culture.

When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of policy failure, officeholders try to avoid blame and justify their decisions by using various legitimation strategies. This paper focuses on the ways in which legitimations are expressed in government social media communication, using the Twitter posts of the British government's Brexit department as an example. We show how governments may seek legitimacy by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual policymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government policy, (5) 'the will of the people', and (6) time pressure. The results suggest that official legitimations in social media posts tend to rely more on references to authority and shared values rather than presentation of evidence and sound arguments.

This article draws attention to how the ethics of democratic representation operates as a discreet factor in a crisis of representation afflicting Western democracies by identifying the ways a disregard for truthfulness can harm democratic representation. We argue that such a disregard undermines democratic representation by (a) reducing freedom and equality, (b) weakening accountability, (c) undermining citizens' trust in democratic institutions, and (d) jeopardising the ability to compromise.

We illustrate the processes that produce these effects by analysing examples of untruthful communication about Brexit by senior British politicians in the post-referendum debates. We show how all four of these effects were triggered by the ways they misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their policy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter.

The 2011 trial of Casey Anthony for the murder of her child, Caylee, dominated media, public, and political attention in the United States. Anthony’s acquittal prompted many lawmakers to rally around “Caylee’s Law,” legislation that criminalizes the failure to report a missing child. This article considers the political rhetoric of Caylee’s Law by qualitatively evaluating statements made by state policymakers across the United States for the 12 months following Anthony’s acquittal. Policymakers’ rhetoric on Caylee’s Law exemplified the tendency to mobilize political action around “triggering events” through claims-making, to justify new penal legislation on the basis of worst case scenarios and public fears, and to demonize the accused in ways that reaffirm social solidarity in the face of heinous crimes. Policymakers used a variety of interconnected techniques to make claims about child protection, to justify the need for Caylee’s Law, and to label and degrade Casey Anthony.

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

In a society in which expertise becomes increasingly specialized, we need to understand how to manage gaps in knowledge between experts in various fields and between experts and the public in general. That need is especially great in the public sphere, where technical understanding and lived experience do not always align. This study attempts to model the process by which discipline-specific topoi filter into common knowledge and general topoi are acknowledged by experts. It first addresses the issue of expertise in complex rhetorical places, then employs Michel Meyer’s reinterpretation of ethos, pathos, and logos to show how experts and nonexperts in such places negotiate rhetorical relationships. The study then explores the social and rhetorical mechanisms by which ideas become commonplaces, building on the established theory of symbolic convergence. Finally, the study demonstrates proof in principle with a brief analysis of one topos in the Reports of the Immigration Commission [1911].

This essay examines how political leaders apologize for historical injustices.
Specifically, we analyze Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for
the head tax imposed upon Chinese immigrants. The prime minister’s apology was
historic in that it marked the first time a Canadian Prime Minister formally
apologized for the head tax. We argue that Harper used a combination of the
frontier myth and collective apology rhetoric in his expression of remorse toward
the Chinese-Canadian community. While controversial, this rhetoric created a
discursive space for a constructive and strengthened relationship between the
Chinese-Canadian community and the Canadian government.

A growing force in children’s literature, public figures’ crossover picturebooks are designed to appeal to adults and children alike. This study takes a critical look at the crossover picturebooks of John Oliver and Stephen Colbert. As forms of parodic advocacy, their books use the doubled worlds of parody to invite audiences into corrective spaces, highlighting the influence at work in the seemingly persuasion free media of children’s books, while simplifying and expanding the issues at stake through a multimodal form of activism. In particular, we add to the literature on political parody a focus on the potential for such discourses to function metanoically – alternating between original and parodied texts to engage in political revisions while forwarding moral visions on behalf of disadvantaged others. Parody and metanoia jointly invite engagement in the hope of doing something different and restoring political options through re-energized design.

The author examines community-focused apologies within international affairs. Specifically, he argues that this form of rhetoric functions as a rhetorical first step to healing relationships that have been hurt by the transgressions one group committed against another. In international affairs, transnational actors, typically nation-states through their political leaders, articulate community-focused apologia to mend relations between peoples, which may serve build a common path toward peace and deepen relationships between these actors. To illustrate this idea, he uses Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's 1995 apology for crimes Japan committed during its wartime past. Murayama's apology was an important step in mending relations between Japan and its neighbors. This article provides a better understanding as to the motives and options rhetors may use in apologizing for past injustices and serves to broaden the way we conceptualize the rhetorical genre of apologia.

During the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary Hillary Clinton choked up briefly in a coffee shop while discussing the difficulties of the election. Critics drew comparisons between the episode and a similar incident involving Ed Muskie in 1972, and predicted it would be Clinton’s downfall. This essay argues that Clinton’s surprising win in New Hampshire can be partly attributed to the fact that this emotional moment opened up a public conversation about the gender bias that she, like female candidates before her, experienced on the campaign trail. Clinton’s quick response and open discussion of the subject illustrated how women candidates can potentially benefit from certain media spectacles.

This paper explores the relationship between social media and political rhetoric. Social media platforms are frequently discussed in relation to ‘post-truth’ politics, but it is less clear exactly what their role is in these developments. Specifically, this paper focuses on Twitter as a case, exploring the kinds of rhetoric encouraged or discouraged on this platform. To do this, I will draw on work from infrastructure studies, an area of Science and Technology Studies; and in particular, on Ford & Wajcman’s analysis of the relationships between infrastructure, knowledge claims and politics on Wikipedia. This theoretical analysis will be supplemented with evidence from previous studies and in the public domain, to illustrate the points made. This analysis echoes wider doubts about the credibility of technologically deterministic accounts of technology’s relationship with society, but suggests however that while Twitter may not be the cause of shifts in public discourse, it is implicated in them, in that it both creates new norms for discourse and enables new forms of power and inequality to operate.

This article addresses the contentious philosophical claim that rhetoric is merely a “philosophy without tears.” Mindful of the institutional and disciplinary stakes of this claim today, it offers a genealogy of “philosophy without tears” across the past century, from the popular “no more tears” genre to midcentury debates between ordinary language philosophers and logical atomists. What emerges is an ethical argument concerning the materiality and transitivity of language, fleshed out through a rhetoric of tears and as an ontology of pain and suffering. Drawing on a rhetorical reading of Wittgenstein’s “form-of-life,” I argue that both pain and its expression should be understood as transitive rather than as epistemological or private phenomena. Transitivity helps us to better understand the perlocutionary power of pain and suffering in the politics of war and terrorism, in the “man-philosopher,” who disavows such transitivity, and, finally, in the necessary risk of responsibility toward the “other” of philosophy (and of rhetoric).

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency.

This study explores depictions of Islam in Senate rhetoric across the 106 th (1999–2000) and 111 th (2009–2010) Congresses. These two periods are compared to consider overall patterns in congressional discourse on Islam and to explore how the September 11 th , 2001 attacks might have shaped this discourse. The study also examines the possible effects of ideology, partisanship, and senator religious affiliation on representations of Islam. The article ultimately suggests that despite some important post-September 11 shifts in Senate rhetoric pertaining to Islam, persistent themes regarding securitization, Orientalist tendencies, moderate-fundamentalist dichotomizations, and ideological divisions merit scrutiny. This study contributes to work on Congress, religion, and American politics by assessing trends in the discursive representation of Islam by United States legislators. Theoretically, the article draws upon the Copenhagen School in International Relations to assess the securitization of Islam within legislative debates and to develop the related concept of normalization.

This essay examines Texas representative Ron Paul’s foreign policy discourse during
the 2008 presidential campaign. The author argues that Paul encased his opposition
to America’s foreign policy within a secular jeremiad. Although Paul failed to win
any of the Republican primaries, his opposition to America’s involvement with Iraq
and other parts of the globe is a microcosm of a larger debate occurring among U.S.
foreign policy elites on the extent of America’s role within the world and about the
very nature of its exceptional status. This analysis informs a theoretical understanding
of American exceptionalism and interrogates a larger debate in U.S. foreign policy.

This essay theorizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme, an emergent argument formation surrounding analogico-digital photography. Instead of presuming the naturalism of images, we contend that contemporary audiences have a heightened awareness of the ways that digital photography is altered. Drawing on the quadripartita ratio, or four categories of change associated with rhetorical figuration, we explore a series of image controversies that denaturalize assumptions about photographic realism. We examine how contemporary protesters respond to this shift in interpretive conventions by making the unnaturalistic enthymeme visible through culture jamming commercial billboards. The unnaturalistic enthymeme does not supplant the naturalistic enthymeme, but instead enables a “hypersophistic” attitude in visual culture—one that decides the veridicality of photographs through argument instead of assumptions about technological objectivity.

In this essay, I argue through analysis of the genre of campaign announcements that third-party presidential candidates have rhetorical norms of their own that address their unique challenges as political outsiders. Specifically, I contend that their announcements are a variant of the announcement genre and are warranted by the recurring situational barriers, perceived strategic constraints, and overall purposes for minor-party presidential campaigns. In addition to offering an alternative theory of third-party announcements based on analysis of over 40 such statements, I provide three case studies—including statements by Progressive Henry Wallace, Independent Eugene McCarthy, and Reform Party nominee Patrick Buchanan—to demonstrate this variant of the genre. Finally, I conclude by discussing the implications of this study for understanding third-party rhetoric.

U.S. President Barack Obama has vowed to "help countries like Mexico… do a better job of creating jobs for their people" as part of his plan to curtail undocumented immigration to the United States (Organizing for America). This idea -that the root cause of undocumented migration from Mexico to the U.S. is economic underdevelopment in Mexico -has currency in both popular and political discourse. But is it accurate? In this article, I synthesize historical, theoretical, and ethnographic scholarship to provide a transnational perspective on twentieth century labor migration from Mexico to the United States. These data show that "illegal" transmigrant labor is not an historical accident, nor merely an unfortunate side effect of legal migration, nor a result of economic underdevelopment in Mexico. Rather, undocumented transmigration is a predictable result of the confluence of three interrelated trends: neoliberal development of the Mexican and U.S. economies, the establishment of transnational social networks over time, and gross disparity between U.S. immigration policy and the realities of labor needs within global capitalism. Political rhetoric that deems unauthorized migration as "Mexico's problem" obscures this economic interdependence, conceals the ways in which development policies have produced itinerant wage labor, and masks the complicity of U.S. policies in encouraging and sustaining undocumented labor migration. Furthermore, rhetoric that distances U.S. policy from labor migration reinforces the marginalization of some estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

A sustained form can be located in the complicated history of populist rhetoric. Despite its chameleonic qualities, the advancement of populism is constituted by alterations in the focus and content, not the structure, of populist activism. This structure, or what I term its argumentative frame, positions a virtuous people against a powerful enemy and expresses disdain toward traditional forms of democratic deliberation and republican representation. I trace these themes through the rhetoric of the People's Party, Huey Long, and George Wallace. I conclude by analyzing the link between populism's persistence in U.S. history and the nation's Founding.

Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use.

Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. In this article, I contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by proposing an improved heuristic for understanding typical macroconversational discursive practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation.

Based on a multidisciplinary review of scholarly literature, I show how personal and institutional risk aversion involves the application of certain strategies of argumentation, framing, denial, social actor and action representation, legitimation and manipulation. I use concrete textual examples from public statements of UK government officeholders to illustrate how blame avoidance works at the highest level of administration.

I argue that to understand blame avoidance as a dominant recurring theme in public communication we should look beyond current linguistic approaches to conflict talk. This could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.

Kofi Annan traveled to Rwanda in May of 1998 attempting to repair the image of the United Nations (U.N.) and to heal the fractured political relationship between the two entities. However, the U.N. secretary general largely failed to fulfill his mission. This article analyzes the reasons why Annan's mea culpa failed. It argues that in Annan's address before the Rwandan parliament, his rhetorical choices constrained his ability to repair the U.N.'s image and U.N.-Rwandan relations. Specifically, this article demonstrates that the U.N. leader's nondiscussion of his personal culpability for U.N. action, his democratization of blame for the genocide, and the appearance of personal arrogance created by his language choices hindered his ability to fulfill his mission. The article concludes with implications for image repair theory, lessons from Annan's failure for rhetors who apologize for historical wrongdoing, and directions for further research into the phenomena of public apology.

Using a different approach to questions of discourse and the State: a policy statement by the leader of the Australian Federal Opposition and the predictions of a magazine astrologist may seem, perhaps, to have little in common. Here Gillen shows that both of these texts, among others, rely upon an oracular and divinatory discourse which has a number of relatively stable characteristics across a surprising historical span. There appear to be generic ways of speaking about the future, recognisable to many. But how? Drawing upon linguistic, semiological and anthropological traditions, this paper describes some of those characteristics and generic ways.

This essay argues that the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, can be partially explained by the rise of what we call presidential eschatology, a religious master narrative that represents a historic shift from presidents appealing to God to presidents becoming a messiah figure. More specifically, we trace President Trump's embrace of this kind of religious discourse-which we contend is a form of weaponized political communication aiming to undermine democracy-to his acceptance of a millennialist narrative fashioned by QAnon conspiracy theorists. Through a close reading of primary sources from the movement, the study illustrates how these eschatological themes surfaced in QAnon's discourse and were exploited by Trump and his allies as they sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Why are some discourses more politically efficacious than others? Seeking answers to this question, Ty Solomon develops a new theoretical approach to the study of affect, identity, and discourse—core phenomena whose mutual interweaving have yet to be fully analyzed in International Relations. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Ernesto Laclau’s approach to hegemonic politics, Solomon argues that prevailing discourses offer subtle but powerfully appealing opportunities for affective investment on the part of audiences. Through empirical case studies of the affective resonances of the war on terror and the rise and fall of neoconservative influence in American foreign policy, Solomon offers a unique way to think about the politics of identity as the construction of “common sense” powerfully underpinned by affective investments. He provides both a fuller understanding of the emotional appeal of political rhetoric in general and, specifically, a provocative explanation of the reasons for the reception of particular U.S. foreign policy rhetoric that shifted Americans’ attitudes toward neoconservative foreign policy in the 1990s and shaped the post-9/11 “war on terror.”

This article examines two different instances of policy defense as a means to show how a socio-cognitive approach to contexts can help develop a dialectical account of the relationship between societal processes and our communicative practices. Based on such analysis, I argue that comparative analyses within a socio-cognitive theory of context can offer new insights into how, first of all, mental models control the process of discourse production and interpretation in important ways, and second, how they are intrinsically related to ideologically based understandings of particular groups and/or situations. Such an approach allows us to account for and explain the potential effectiveness of the discursive moves that emerge from this co-constitutive relationship between contexts and communicative practices.

This essay argues for a cognitive, contextual and reception oriented approach to visual argumentation. It illustrates such an approach by analyzing the context and rhetorical potential of an election campaign advertisement and by establishing which arguments the public actually reconstructed from this advertisement.

Information visualizations (" infographics ") have long been part of the production of knowledge, although the rise of digital media brought about a significant expansion in both their volume and their use for political purposes. This article provides a first overview and typology of the emergent genre we term " digital political infographics. " Informed by literature and theory about visualizations, political persuasion, interfaces, and digital sharing, we aimed to reveal the " data-politics " unique to this expression form. A grounded analysis of 200 politically oriented infographics on Twitter yielded a two-dimensional typology relating to the narrative strategies and the interfaces underpinning users' engagement with data in this discursive format. An integrative evaluation revealed that digital political infographics are hybrid communicative forms, characterized by three influence trajectories between political persuasion, infographic conventions, and digital environments: " politicizing " infographic traits, " infographing " political tactics, and creating a new common ground, featuring a rhetoric of " tactile data experience. "

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially discriminalised sex between men in England and Wales, all five living British prime ministers (Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major) wrote exclusively for the LGBT news website PinkNews. Drawing eclectically on recent work on social representations of history and a rhetorical psychological approach to commemorative discourse, this article examines how these prime ministers represented the history of LGBT rights and how such representations were used rhetorically. The prime ministers figuratively represented the Act as the start of a long road to LGBT equality. In doing so, the historical event was anchored in a contemporary political agenda for LGBT equality. However, despite this being an outward display of unified celebration, these prime ministers indirectly engaged in the business of party politics by selectively praising the achievements of their own parties and omitting how LGBT rights have been advanced by their opponents. Theresa May in particular managed the Conservative Party’s brand. It is argued that representations of the past provide a selective and partial view of the history of LGBT rights in the UK but that we should go beyond examining the content of representations to examine how they are put to political ends.

This article examines the Instagram page for Bye Felipe, a feminist campaign where people submit screenshots of examples
of harassment and sexual entitlement from men on online dating sites such as OKCupid and apps such as Tinder. I frame
the campaign as an example of feminist discursive activism. The site owners collect contributions and aggregate examples
of particular discursive patterns in hook up apps, in order to make collective political claims, a strategy that Tomlinson
calls “intensification.” I address the existing literature on cyber-misogyny and online harassment, and also research on
previous similar campaigns such as Fedoras of OKCupid to discuss shaming as a political practice. I then draw out the patterns
and concepts invoked in interventions and resultant discussions on Bye Felipe, examining the themes of rejection, silence
and who has the right to silence, rape culture, and gendered sexual entitlement. I identify the political claims being made
through the rhetorical strategies described in the first part of the article. Drawing on the work of McCosker on trolling as
provocation, I discuss the role of repetition and rehearsal in the practice of discursive politics. Finally, through a discursive
analysis of responses to the posts on Instagram and Facebook over time, I explore the ongoing and difficult boundary work
around what constitutes appropriate examples for the site, and the articulation of feminist claims and discourses.