Pandemijos retorika: argumentavimo strategijos socialinio tinklo „Facebook“ komentaruose

An analysis of the public COVID-19 discourse reveals how the public responds to the crisis and what kind of communication is actualized during a pandemic. The object of this research is the argumentation strategies in the comments of the articles about coronavirus on social media “Facebook”. The aim of the research is to expand the argumentative level of discourse: to analyze rhetorical and eristic arguments. The comments were collected from the accounts of the most popular Lithuanian news portals on “Facebook” (alfa.lt, Delfi, 15min, lrytas.lt). The analyzed comments were published during the first and second pandemic waves (from March 2020 to January 2021). The research material was analyzed by means of the rhetorical discourse analysis method to isolate and define the categories of rhetoric characteristic to rhetorical appeals models. The chosen method of rhetorical analysis was combined with content analysis. During the research, the respective rhetorical categories of the researched phenomenon were identified and classified, and the content of these categories was expanded – a rhetorical content analysis was performed. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented situation in which the rhetorical analysis of the communication element is a whole new area of research. The identified dominant models of rhetorical and eristic reasoning not only reveal the regularities of media “consumption” but also help to understand the tendencies of choosing communication strategies in critical situations.

Mathematics Teachers and Curriculum: Authors or Actors?

Background: Among the plurality of themes addressed by curricular studies, the nature of decision-making processes involving education professionals has guided some research agendas. Delineated by one of those agendas, this text starts by asking what the participation of teachers in processes involving curriculum is. Objective: To analyse the rationality underlying the involvement of mathematics teachers in the context of curriculum reforms in Brazil and Portugal, presenting a theoretical basis inspired by Jürgen Habermas and its suitability to discuss teachers’ participation as authors or actors of curricula reforms. Design: Reconstructive analysis of rationality according to the Habermasian discursive ethics. Settings and participants: The context of a comparative study that surveys documents and interviews with two managers of a curricular reform project in Portugal and Brazil, respectively. Data collection and analysis: Analysis of the rationality that underlies the discourse present in curriculum documents of the countries involved and interviews. Results: Centralising elements of national curriculum policies do not mean by themselves the homogenisation of curricula, the rationality that underlies how projects predict the participation of teachers express an illusory discursive varnish about “teachers actively participating,” there are spaces of micropolicies with controlled margin of changes that advocate mathematics teachers as builders of policies, but the mechanisms of external regulation contradict this. Conclusions: Historically, in both countries, the educational systems, even expressing a rhetorical discourse on autonomy and flexibility, have remained hostages to the regulation of centralist global policies.

‘We Are a Global Community’: Communicating Knowledge through Moocs and Teacher Training Platforms

A socio-rhetorical discourse community consists of a group of people who come together to pursue objectives that predate those of socialization and solidarity, and who aim to develop and maintain their own discoursal characteristics. We have examined MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) and teacher training educational platforms in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they may be identified as networked learning tools and discourse communities characterized by a commonality of goals, mechanisms and procedures of intercommunication, exchange of knowledge, information, as well as specialized genres and their terminology. MOOCs and learning platforms have dramatically changed the way people learn. Starting from ongoing research, we analyze the metadiscoursal features of an ad hoc corpus of online filmed lectures drawn from two MOOC providers (FutureLearn and Coursera). We look at both interactive and interactional resources (to guide the listener through the texts and to involve the listener in the subject), in order to discover how these features are used to control, evaluate and negotiate the communicative goals and impact of the ongoing exchanges. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows a significant use of metadiscourse markers in the video lectures with a higher frequency of interactional features such as self-mentions, engagement markers, hedges and boosters, rather than interactive ones. These commentaries in the lectures signal the instructors’ attitudes towards the texts and their listeners. Additionally, they were found to perform a rhetorical function since they persuasively reinforce the instructors’ attitude and stance. Thus, their use engages the participants as members of a digital community, where commitment, dedication, and common goals seem to be fundamental features.

Doctrine of Affections

The “doctrine of affections” is a legendary creature created by early-20th-century German musicologists: its head is made of prescriptive treatises and its body of descriptive compositions. The term has however entered scholarly parlance and is commonly used to refer to a cluster of theorizations and compositional strategies that shared a common aim: emphasizing the affective dimension of music in order to move the listener. The “doctrine of affections” derives its name from the German term Affektenlehre and it lived its golden age in the Baroque era (see the Oxford Bibliographies article on Baroque Music and its section “Music-Theoretical Issues”). It merges a renewed humanistic interest in the ars rhetorica, ensued to the rediscovery of texts such as Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria during the 15th century, with an interest in the mechanics of the passions, fostered by Descartes’ Passions de l’âme (1649). The power of music to raise or soothe the passions had already been discussed by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle (the latter’s theory of catharsis proving especially successful during the Renaissance), and in some sense “doctrines of affections” have often accompanied the history of thinking about music and its effects. However the “doctrine of affections” stricto sensu is tied to the revival of doctrines of musical ethos by the humanists, in combination with medical elements derived from galenic temperament theory and with the idea of musica humana derived from Boethius (Ficino’s theories being a notable example of this combination). Baroque doctrines of affections, while deriving some themes—such as the link between modes and affects—from these former traditions, modified their gravity center. From a Renaissance medical model interested in the bodily transformations induced by music, the focus shifts to a rhetorical model interested in producing determinate effects on the listeners in the orator’s mode. During the 16th and 17th centuries, from the philosophical upsurge of interest in passions themselves and in their communicability and from the coeval transformations in musical compositional techniques, a renovated rhetorical discourse on affective music and its relation to the poetical texts was drafted. Drawing on the speculations of authors like Descartes, Mersenne, and Kircher, 18th-century theorists tried to single out the affective power of modes and figures, albeit without creating universal theories. These musico-rhetorical theories dawned when a new way of addressing the world of the passions and affections was devised later in the 18th century.

Irony and heroism

In the article we investigate the Christian – pagan polemic of Origen's treatise “Contra Celsum” in fragment 7.53-58, where the problem of the correlation of irony and heroism reveals the contrast between false and true deeds, for which divine honours are given. The irony that Celsus uses to attack Christians serves as a kind of “divide” that marks a contrast between pagan ideas about heroism, as a principle of deification of people, and the principles on which, from Celsus’ point of view of, Christians consider Jesus to be God. A special subject of the article is Celsus’ reflection on the ironic motive of the Book of Jonah, the story of the gourd (Jonah 4, 5-11), and the salvation of the prophet Daniel from the lion's den (Dan. 6, 16-23). Origen’s response to Celsus’ speech shows a certain similarity to the text of a pagan author in structural, stylistic and lexical aspects. Such factor reveals a rhetorical content of the response of Origen. In the field of rhetorica, Origen uses irony against his opponent: pagan heroes and philosophers now appear funny or not serious enough, whereas the Old Testament prophets are revealed as genuinely great and as a source of miracles. In light of this, Origen’s response to Celsus replaces Celsus’ ironic allusion to the gourd story from the fourth chapter of the Book of Jonah with the first verse of the second chapter, which opens the episode of Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale. An analysis of this substitution, based on the hermeneutic principles of Origen, shows the role of Biblical irony as a specific aspect of the spiritual meaning of the sacred text. It is hypothesized that the essence of this specificity is the creation of a contrast that sets any feat of any person in the light of the historical life of Jesus Christ, who completely and exceptionally realized God's providence. This reveals a pattern or principle of going beyond the limits of human virtue to the sphere of divine being. To compare any feats with the earthly life and the death of the Saviour renders the opposition of ironic and heroic no longer a contrast between false and true: any heroism, even the exploits of the Old Testament prophets, becomes ironic / ridiculous. Thus Origen’s Christian irony is not only an instrument of rhetorical discourse, but a philosophical and literary device that allows transcending, or elevating to an unattainable level, the heroism of the life and death of the Saviour.

Evaluating animentary’s potential as a rhetorical genre

Multimodality scholarship has hitherto mainly focused on the combination of static visuals and written language (see Bateman et al., Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis -- A Problem-Oriented Introduction, 2017; Tseronis and Forceville, Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres, 2017; and Forceville, ‘Multimodality’, in press, for discussion and bibliographies). However, drawing on visuals, written language, spoken language, music and sound, film is a multimodal medium par excellence. In this article, the authors specifically focus on documentary film. Documentary can be considered to be the cinematic equivalent of audiovisual rhetorical discourse, aiming to persuade its envisaged audience of something. Obviously, it is crucial for the credibility of documentaries that they are seen as indexically rooted in reality. But, recently, documentary film has witnessed the flourishing of a subgenre that may seem to challenge this indexicality: the ‘animentary’ – a documentary that consists to a considerable extent of animated images. While the completely constructed nature of animation means that animentaries’ indexical relation between audiovisual representation and represented world is loosened, or even absent, animentaries also – and importantly – enable perspectives on reality that live-action documentary cannot. This article analyses how the visual, verbal, sonic and musical modes function rhetorically in four feature-length animentaries that share the theme of ‘war’: Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008), 25 April (dir. Leanne Pooley, 2015), Chris the Swiss (dir. Anja Kofmel, 2018) and Another Day of Life (dir. Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow, 2019). The authors conclude that the written and spoken verbal modes play a crucial role in safeguarding animentaries’ referential relation to reality.

A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of the Student Facebook Group UWO Students Against Israel Apartheid Week

This MRP will examine the use of rhetorical strategies in an online political discussion group. The Rhetoric of Social Intervention (RSI) model will be used to perform a rhetorical and textual discourse analysis of the comments that users post in the Facebook group Each element of the RSI model (attention, power, need) helps group members to communicate their message through a persuasive approach, possibly leading to the enactment of some type of online or offline political change. Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is a valuable case study because this annual event occurs in an attempt to instill the ideology that global society should view Israel as an apartheid state. Since ideology and rhetoric form the underpinnings of the RSI model, this lens is relevant to evaluating the use of rhetorical strategies within this particular group. The rhetorical dimensions of online discourse must be further explored in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the role of online political communication within a digital era.

A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of the Student Facebook Group UWO Students Against Israel Apartheid Week

This MRP will examine the use of rhetorical strategies in an online political discussion group. The Rhetoric of Social Intervention (RSI) model will be used to perform a rhetorical and textual discourse analysis of the comments that users post in the Facebook group Each element of the RSI model (attention, power, need) helps group members to communicate their message through a persuasive approach, possibly leading to the enactment of some type of online or offline political change. Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is a valuable case study because this annual event occurs in an attempt to instill the ideology that global society should view Israel as an apartheid state. Since ideology and rhetoric form the underpinnings of the RSI model, this lens is relevant to evaluating the use of rhetorical strategies within this particular group. The rhetorical dimensions of online discourse must be further explored in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the role of online political communication within a digital era.

Policing language in the world of new work: the commodification of workplace communication in organizational consulting

This paper examines how the shift to knowledge and innovation economy has created new sites for the commodification of language and communication in the context of organizational consulting. The data come from a consultant-led development and training program of the management teams of a Finnish educational organization. In the study, the year-long training was videotaped (45 h) and followed ethnographically. By using rhetorical discourse analysis as a method, we examine how the consultant-led training activities present the role of language and communication in changing working life. The results show how the activities factualize the transformation of work and the centrality of language in this transformation. They conceptualize language and communication as key elements of professional competence and resources for organizational improvement. Moreover, they construct causal relations between organizational success and the ability to assess and modify one’s own communicative behavior. With its focus on language awareness and contextual variation the training differs from settings examined in previous studies where the mechanisms of commodification are based on standardization practices. In conclusion, we reflect the training programs both as indicators and vehicles for social change and discuss how they act as spaces where the new worlds of work are discursively construed.