«That’s just my opinion»: The principle of expression and the public debate

Public debate is commonly understood as deliberation; as the weighing of arguments for and against choices of future action. A principle of deliberation entails that interlocutors approach one another through argumentation in favour and against a given point of view. In this article, I outline a competing debate ideal, the principle of expression, and demonstrate its pervasiveness in contemporary public rhetoric. According to this communicative ideal, public debate is understood not as an exchange of opinion but rather a display of opinions. The beliefs and opinions voiced in the public debate should, moreover, be seen as purely expressive: They arise out of the individual’s inviolable interiority and individuality. As such, argumentation is neither required nor legitimate. In the article, I outline the principle of expression and discuss its implications for the democratic public debate. I do so, by drawing on a case study of public debate in social media, as well as recent utterances spoken by political leaders. In moving between the utterances of ordinary people engaged in public debate in the informal setting of social media and the utterances of political leaders in formal settings, I demonstrate the pervasiveness of the principle of expression in contemporary public rhetoric.

Stay Home, Stay Safe Proximity as Vitality ad Vulnerability Under Lockdown

From March to May 2020 in the UK, measures that became known across the world as ‘lockdown’ curtailed personal freedoms in order to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus. While initial criticisms of lockdown focused on the adverse impacts of social isolation on wellbeing, this research article explores how lockdown creates new and altered proximities and intimacies as well as distances. During the initial UK lockdown, the ‘household’ and ‘home’ were deployed in public rhetoric as default spaces of care and security in the face of widespread isolation and uncertainty. However, emergent proximities created by bringing people together in the assumed safety of home also deepened existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. Using anthropological theory, third sector evidence, and ethnographic interview data we explore this process. We argue that understanding proximity and intimacy as fundamentally ambivalent, not normatively affirming, is central to recognising how pandemic responses such as lockdown reinforce and reproduce existing forms of inequality and violence.

Tolerance of Ambiguity: Negotiating Religion and Sustaining the Lingsar Festival and Its Performing Arts in Lombok, Indonesia

Multiple forces vie to control the narratives of the Lingsar festival, a major annual event initiated about 350 years ago that uniquely brings together the indigenous Muslim Sasak and the migrant Hindu Balinese on Lombok, an island east of Bali in Indonesia. This attention to the festival is not surprising because governments, political and religious figures, commercial interests, and tourist industries compete to define and benefit from such events worldwide. Since 1983, I have noticed a variety of changes in religious beliefs, ritual personnel and protocol, interreligious relationships, sociocultural identities, founding narratives, and performing arts over time. Once, this festival featured beliefs and performing arts that were localized, neither truly Hindu nor Islamic, and ingrained into the natural, ancestralized environment. However, the festival had to Islamize and Sasakize (that is, become more Sasak) to retain relevance among the Sasak, and had to Hinduize and Balinize to remain relevant among the Balinese. Despite these changes and increasing pressures from reformist organizations, the festival continues; in fact, it has grown in popularity and, by 2019, attracted up to 50,000 people. A tolerance of ambiguity—allowing for changing and contradictory artistic narratives, multiple ritual positions and interpretations, new positionings of interreligious relationships, and deviation from public rhetoric—has been crucial to maintain the Lingsar festival into the 21st century.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard

Chapter 4 narrates the life and public reform of Frances Willard. A female public speaker and writer, Willard took on the cult of domesticity and the strict gender roles enforced in the American Industrial Age. Facing gender inequality, Willard fought for women’s rights and social reform, serving as the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In addition to describing Willard’s life, this chapter examines the use of her public platform and the authority of her public rhetoric to influence the lives of women seeking equal opportunities. Analyzing her narrative of cultural reform in her two books, How to Win: A Book for Girls and Woman in the Pulpit, this chapter explores the rhetorical tactics Willard used to effectively argue for equality and egalitarianism for women in church and society.

Sociolinguistic variation and the public interest

Although the disparity between sociolinguistic knowledge and popular beliefs about language diversity is well documented, little proactive attention has been given to changing public misconceptions. How can programs about linguistic diversity be presented when the prevailing public language ideology is largely fueled by the principle of linguistic subordination and interpreted in terms of a correctionist model? The approach to dialect awareness presented here is based on the underlying assumption that the public is inherently curious about language differences and that this intrigue can be transformed into public education venues. It connects the legacy of language variation to legitimate historical and cultural themes that are intrinsically interesting to the public, and assumes that the most effective and permanent education takes place when learners discover truths for themselves. It further presumes that positively framed presentations of language differences in socioculural and sociohistoical context hold a greater likelihood of being received by the public than the direct confrontation of seemingly unassailable ideologies. The presentation considers three quite different venues to exemplify engagement: (1) an extended, long-term engagement commitment in a small, historically isolated research community; (2) language documentaries in public education; and (3) the role of activist linguists on university campuses. The presentation demonstrates that the public rhetoric on linguistic diversity can, in fact, be reconciled with a linguistically informed perspective and that language-awareness programs can serve a range of audiences utilizing a variety of venues.

Explaining Resistance to Early Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants to New South Wales

In the 1830s, the British government commenced a programme of relocating poor labourers to its Australian colony of New South Wales, a practice known as ‘assisted migration’. Though intended to address the colony’s labour shortage, the new arrivals were met with hostility by the colonial elite, who claimed the immigrants were immoral and unsuitable as workers. While migration historians have shown these judgements to be largely unfair, the forces underpinning these perceptions await a thorough interrogation. This article examines colonial public rhetoric about immigration to reveal attitudes shaped by a tangle of overlapping and reinforcing political, economic, and cultural factors. Ultimately, the colonial elite wanted to control who could enter their community, both physically and socially, which became a temporally persistent pattern vital to the settler colonial project.

The sources of formation and specific features of public rhetoric of Metropolitan Platon of Moscow (Levshin)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the best examples of ancient and ecclesiastical eloquence, which are the main sources of the formation of public rhetoric of Metropolitan Platon of Moscow. Representing science closely related to philosophical knowledge, public rhetoric is formed as an effective means of education, enlightenment, and influence on public opinion, so its priority task is inextricably linked with the search for and justification of truth which do not contradict moral principles. The special qualities of Church eloquence of FR. Platon, including persuasiveness, reasonableness, ethics, benevolence, are improved throughout his theological and teaching activities and allow him to become an outstanding rhetorician of the past and present. The analysis of the Metropolitan’s theoretical and practical heritage reveals the scale and international recognition of his personality and creativity. It is shown that modern Church and secular rhetoric require the involvement of both traditional and innovative forms and methods of communication with the audience. The use of the developed classical public rhetoric of Metropolitan Platon of Moscow enriches the methodology and method of speeches of both preachers and lay speakers. Thanks to psychological, ethical, and image factors, the idea of the speaker’s speech is conveyed to everyone.

Deniable Contact

Despite the importance of secret negotiations during the Northern Ireland conflict there is no full-length study of the use of back-channels in repeated efforts to end the ‘Troubles’. This book provides a textured account that extends our understanding of the distinctive dynamics of negotiations conducted in secret and the conditions conducive to the negotiated settlement of conflict. It disrupts and challenges some conventional notions about the conflict in Northern Ireland, offering a fresh analysis of the political dynamics and the intra-party struggles that sustained violent conflict and prevented settlement for so long. It draws on theories of negotiation and mediation to understand why efforts to end the conflict through back-channel negotiations repeatedly failed before finally succeeding in the 1990s. It challenges the view that the conflict persisted because of irreconcilable political ideologies and argues that the parties to conflict were much more open to compromise than the often-intransigent public rhetoric suggested. The analysis is founded on a rich store of historical evidence, including the private papers of key Irish republican leaders and British politicians, recently released papers from national archives in Dublin and London, and the papers of Brendan Duddy, the intermediary who acted as the primary contact between the IRA and the British government during key phases of engagement, including papers that have not yet been made publicly available. This documentary evidence, combined with original interviews with politicians, mediators, civil servants, and republicans, allows a vivid picture to emerge of the complex maneuvering at this intersection.

The Economy of Self-Declared Kosovo

Received 30.10.2020. Intensification of the final resolving processes over the Kosovo issue made it necessary to pay closer attention to social and economic features of the self-declared polity, which are often underestimated losing scores in favor of political, not economical, agenda. With emphasis on the most recent data (2015–2020), Kosovo official statistics, international and local organizations, mass media materials, with high involvement of interviews and surveys conducted during working trips to the Balkan region, and long-term observations, this paper is urged to remove this gap and to answer the question of economic independence and viability, directly concerned with the fundamental matter of sovereignty. Despite the thesis on favorable starting conditions in a form of abundance of various natural resources and ready-made industrial base, widely used in public rhetoric during separatist movement, the words have mostly remained just words – no significant structural changes have taken place in Kosovo’s economy since its self-declared independence in 2008. Reports reflect some increase of economic activity since 2015, but in almost all key directions – administrative reform, fundamental rights, fight against corruption and organized crime, regional cooperation development, etc. – there has been a very little progress up to date. Huge informal sector, desperate situation with youth’s unemployment, gender disproportion in the labor and legal fields – these are among the strongest economic challenges and the highest barriers for Kosovo on its way to European integration. In recent years, local economy drivers were state investments into infrastructure and private consumption, which is still mostly based on large transactions from abroad, together with increasing salary rates and lending. Economic diversification goes slowly. Base metals and mineral products dominate – same as during previous years – in regional export of goods, providing slightly less than a half of its entire volume. Excessive reliance on import is another feature of economic development in contemporary Kosovo. List of services and goods providers remains stable for the past decade, led by Germany and Italy, with growing influence of China and Turkey. Some improvement of business climate co-exists with essential economic problems. Kosovo’s economy still highly depends on external incomes and internal trade sector. Local educational system does not match local labor market needs. Financial discipline, efficient distribution of resources, optimization of sectoral interaction, fight against corruption and crime – these tasks remain the ones of high priority and are still in the current economic agenda today, like they were five and 10 years ago. Kosovo’s real investment attractiveness is in question; however, much work has been done in the legal field to speed up and secure the fundraising process. Unresolved problems of property rights and lack of political will to handle these issues hurt investment perspectives and slow down economic development. COVID‑2019 brings additional damage to Kosovo’s economy, but its overall results are to be yet evaluated.

Medicine, Midwifery, and the Law

A body of nearly ninety criminal trials for abortion and infanticide in nineteenth-century Yucatán reveal some contradictory traits. On one hand, the testimony that licensed physicians provided to courts about the nature of the medicines that midwives and boticarios supplied to pregnant Mayan women was surprisingly respectful and supportive of these unlicensed health practitioners. The cases reveal both the ongoing practice of Mayan medicinal and botanical knowledge in obstetrical health at the close of the nineteenth century and, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, individual doctors’ tolerance of, or accommodation to, such practices. On the other hand, the local judges who tried these cases displayed much less accommodation to Mayan defendants, reflecting the pronounced Mayan and non-Mayan social and political tensions that characterized the era of the peninsula’s Caste War.