John Schilb will focus on a speech: Frederick Douglass’s 1876 dedication of D. C.’s Emancipation Memorial, which features an upright Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave kneeling below. Midway through his address, Douglass criticized Lincoln, but he concluded by exalting him. In Rhetorical Refusals (2007), Schilb examined academic debates about which part of the speech matters more. In 2020, however, this emerged as a public issue, in a controversy over the Memorial itself. Protestors demanded that it be removed because it diminished Black agency. To bolster their argument, they cited the speech’s middle section, while their opponents emphasized its pro-Lincoln end. Rhetorical hermeneutics, Schilb will argue, is a productive approach to these different readings. But it needs to bear in mind what’s now happened with Douglass’s speech. For both sides in the Memorial debate, his text has become one of many materials they have assembled to advance their cause.
Caddie Alford will point out that, when it comes to the Internet, current debates about the state of public discourse seem most concerned about the state of opinions. From Shannon Vallor likening extreme beliefs to unthinking artificial intelligence, to Jenny Odell condemning the attention economy for its amplification of a tyrannical public opinion, opinions come out as the enemy of both healthy deliberation and robust creativity. Such cultural conversations grant new relevance to an old term in rhetoric, doxa, the Ancient Greek concept for opinion. Digital conditions, though, require more nuanced theories of doxa than the field of rhetorical studies has offered so far. The ideological turn in the 1980s, for instance, conflated opinions with ideology, while theories of epistemic rhetoric upheld knowledge production at opinion’s expense. If rhetorical hermeneutics is to succeed as a method, it has to attend to the ongoing historicity of its contemporary moment. The rise of conspiracy theories, and of digital illiteracy more generally, raises urgent questions: Can we even make sense with opinions? Is there anything sensible about online expression? Ultimately, might it be possible to discover the sense of opinions in our digital age? Alford will develop a theory of opinions as bodily, inventive, and emergent. She will do so by examining the QAnon conspiracy theory as it unfolded online during the 2021 Presidential inauguration.
Steven Mailloux will use rhetorical hermeneutics as an approach for interpreting the political theology of international public performances. During the 2016 Presidential campaign debate over immigration policy, candidate Donald Trump criticized Pope Francis as being too political, a mere pawn of Mexico’s migration politics. When a reporter asked about Trump’s criticism, the Pope smiled and said, “Well, thank God he said I was ‘political’ because Aristotle defined the human person as animal politicus. At least I am [considered] a human person.” Then more seriously, the Pope added, “As to whether I am a pawn, well, maybe, I don't know. I'll leave that up to your judgment and that of the people. [But] a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” After the election, President Trump visited the Vatican, and the Pope presented him with a signed copy of his encyclical "Laudato si’: On Care for our Common Home," a plea for environmental justice. This gift was a public rhetorical gesture, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stop Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Mailloux will examine tropes, arguments, and narratives employed in the debates surrounding what Trump and Pope Francis said. He will consider how to deal practically with radical disagreements in which politics overlaps with religion. What is required, he will argue, is a blend of theory and practice that he calls rhetorical pragmatism.