Ellen Gorsevski

ACN Blog article (‘blarticle’) on viewing events of 6 Jan. 2021 from a nonviolent perspective.
Here’s the link my Blog post contribution to ACN on The events of 6 Jan. 2021—pardon a few typos or editorial bits, I had to work fast so they could upload it quickly!

https://ashlandcenterfornonviolence.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-storming-of-us-capitol.html

Please need to click on the link to read the full blog post.

This essay explores Pocahontas as a polysemic symbol of multiculturalism in the US. Such critique supports decolonizing by illuminating normalizing processes refashioning Indigenous people past and present within masculinized whiteness narratives that dominate the US's current political climate. President Trump's repetition of Pocahontas as slur presents an opportunity to theorize possible ways white supremacist memes invoke colonial myths, inviting intersectional silencing through associatively equating Pocahontas, via synecdoche, with Senator Warren as representative of women in progressive politics. I problematize my standpoint as a white scholar with a matrilineal family narrative linkage to Pocahontas. Indigenous histories, bodies and voices may be variously represented by synecdoche in simultaneously positive and negative ways through polysemy. Exploring her mythic role as peacebuilder and multicultural heroine indicates possibilities for agency of those identified with her within multicultural discourses.

KEYWORDS: Visual rhetoric, Pocahontas, Native Americans, Trump, anticolonial politics, matrilineal standpoint

Rhetorical study has long been, and continues to be, crucial in pressing for the remediation of human suffering worldwide. Interdisciplinarity with complementary areas of study, such as cultural studies, legal studies, economics and other studies, has been part of rhetoric’s vital role in advocating civil and human rights for those harmed by communicative practices that reify variables such as race, class, nationality, or sex and gender as lesser statuses.  Communication scholars can equally embrace knowledge across disciplines such as biology, veterinary studies, conservation and environmental studies, to support respect for and communication on behalf of animals.  Hybridity in humanimal and biotic communication exists, but presently lacks institutional legitimacy.  From fighting poaching to pressing for creation and communication for nonhuman animal recognition, recontextualizing rhetorical theory within biotic hybridity can contribute to peacebuilding and justice for all sentient beings.  [Note:  To conform to copyright at Lexington Press, this pdf is just a wee glimpse, you'll need to get the book to read the whole chapter].

This essay discusses how neoliberalism's giant agri-meats business to food consumer model can be addressed in classes by using readings, video clips, films and other media to enable students to engage in a mindful and anti-consumerist stance.  The essay proposes ways to invite open-ended class discussion of shared suffering by both non-human animals and human beings as workers/consumers within neoliberalism.

LOOKING FOR AN AMAZING CLASS* in Fall 2015?
SIGN UP FOR… COMM 4200.
Discourses of Power (3 credits).
Instructor:  Dr. E.W. Gorsevski, author + recipient of the B. Aubrey Fisher Award
In this course, we will work together to investigate underlying politics in a number of contexts such as racism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, militarism, consumerism, seeking an understanding of those power structures that are often buried beneath our normalized everyday communication practices. Our course texts, media, assignments and discussions will examine how many dimensions like identity, cultural capital and power are constructed through our communication. 
Prerequisites: COMM 1020.  (This course may count as an elective for both non-majors and majors in Communication; contact your academic advisor for details.)
Course books: 
1) Traditional text:  Van Dijk, T. (2008).  Discourse and Power. Palgrave Macmillan.
2) Illustrated teaching text:    Andreas, J. (2004).  Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism.  AK Press.org.
 

*Disclaimer:  Satisfaction depends on variables such as class attendance, assignment completion, and productivity of each individual student.

LOOKING FOR AN AMAZING CLASS* in Fall 2015?
SIGN UP FOR…
COMM 4200. Discourses of Power (3 credits).
Instructor:  Dr. E.W. Gorsevski, author + recipient of the B. Aubrey Fisher Award
In this course, we will work together to investigate underlying politics in a number of contexts such as racism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, militarism, consumerism, seeking an understanding of those power structures that are often buried beneath our normalized everyday communication practices. Our course texts, media, assignments and discussions will examine how many dimensions like identity, cultural capital and power are constructed through our communication. 
Prerequisites: COMM 1020.  (This course may count as an elective for both non-majors and majors in Communication; contact your academic advisor for details.)
Course books: 
1) Traditional text:  Van Dijk, T. (2008).  Discourse and Power. Palgrave Macmillan.
2) Illustrated teaching text:    Andreas, J. (2004).  Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism.  AK Press.org.
 

*Disclaimer:  Satisfaction depends on variables such as class attendance, assignment completion, and productivity of each individual student.

ABSTRACT
Chapter 10
Frank Church’s Natural Place in American Public Address:  Light Green Orations that Saved “The River of No Return Wilderness”
Although it remains obscure for most Americans, especially compared to famous natural landscapes such as Yellowstone, Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness (RNRW), is just as spectacular.  As a result of tireless campaigning by environmentalists like Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the RNRW was established by Congress in 1980 as the largest official wilderness area in the lower 48 states.  This chapter’s essay explores Church’s oratory to preserve Idaho’s threatened wilderness lands for future generations.
This case study examines Church’s oratory as influential, moderate environmental rhetoric, which I term “light green” environmental discourse.  Church’s light green rhetoric proffers lessons for environmentalists today who face a similarly challenging rhetorical situation that is rife with pressures to roll back tenuously held environmental concerns in favor of ‘dirty’ energy initiatives presented by advocates of many industries that are destructive to the precious few remaining wilderness areas in the U.S. 
Church was so instrumental in securing recent additions to preserved natural spaces in the American West that, following Church’s death in 1982, Idaho Senator Jim McClure successfully lobbied Congress to rename the wilderness, prefixing ‘Frank Church’ to the RNRW. This case study examines Church’s influential rhetoric, proffering lessons for environmentalists today who face a similarly challenging rhetorical situation. 
In appreciating Church’s public address, ranging from formal to informal settings between Washington, DC and town halls in Idaho’s back country, this study covers two key questions.  First, how was Church able to work so effectively with Idaho’s myriad arch-conservative political factions, which favored using the lands for development, including logging and ranching, and convince conflicting groups to instead set aside massive land spaces?  Second, considering the environmental nadir from the 1960s to the 1980s, when natural preservation was benighted with an onslaught of coal, oil and gas industries incursions, how was Church able to persuade federal and nationwide factions to likewise save this extraordinary wilderness for posterity?  Overall, this study discusses Church as an award-winning orator, who contributed his significant rhetorical skills in the service of great American environmental preservation, from his sparkling eloquence in debates leading to passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act to his final years in the Senate, culminating with his RNRW victory in 1980.

... Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, San Diego, CA. Lyon, SE (2002). Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's women's two roles: women writing about women's dilemmas. International Conference: Alva Myrdal's Questions to Our Times. ...

... performances in the media also factor into a given society's ability to transform itself anew, creating possibilities for peace (Bratic, 2008). ... Shifting focus from African nations' issues toward the post-conflict scene in the Balkans, Olivera Simic's essay, “Activism for Peace in Bosnia ...

Second Life is an expansive virtual world that implicitly promises personal liberation from the everyday woes we experience in our modern lives. Much like other interactive virtual reality spaces/places such as the Sims, Second Life (hereafter SL) conjures a new life for the ...

... View all notes. Arthur Quinn points out that boxing manager Joe Jacobs' complaint over a controversial call in a 1932 boxing rematch, “We was robbed!” is a prime example of grammatical substitution, or enallage, which strategically heightens the impact of the complaint.46 46. ...

Page 1. 484 Rhetoric & Public Affairs reallocated as the Internet engenders the pattern of "cocooning," or holing up in front of our computers? And, what of a cyber-democracy in which the gap between information "haves" and "have-nots" accelerates? ...

Using rhetorical analysis in the form of an autoethnographically informed biocritique, this study applies and expands the concept of rhetorical plasticity to examine the popular museum exhibit Bodies: The Exhibition, which is arguably the most controversial of a series of contemporary museum exhibits that feature deceased human bodies that have been plasticized and entertainingly displayed for public viewing in museums

... goes well beyond the forensic or evidence-building, fixed-pie language of the trial attorney or ... the forms and tech-niques of writing." In short, whereas primary rhetoric is "pragmatic and pur ... than our colleagues in communication theory.4 Thus it is those who conduct research in ...

Dr. Ellen Gorsevski
August 2020
ACN Blog article (‘blarticle’) on assessing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from a nonviolent perspective [circa Aug. 2020].
Here’s the link my Blog post contribution to ACN on The atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in light of current nuclear policies.
Scroll down [past the top blog post] to get to my blog post contribution at:
https://ashlandcenterfornonviolence.blogspot.com/2020/08/

For many of us, the thought of having to give a speech, or lead some big, in public and energy intensive kind of activism can be daunting. Speeches and protests get most of the attention of rhetorical scholars. I have discovered, however, that a massive part of contemporary activism, that hidden and less well understood part, is doing rhetorical activism by coloring outside the lines of forms which invade our everyday life. Forms are issued forth constantly from bureaucracies; such forms frequently delimit, circumscribe, and usually end up shaping into conformity or apathy the contours of our lives at work, in family settings, in healthcare, in schools, and in our communities. This research and standpoint informed essay explores rhetorical agitation and activism that deploys forms to 'talk back' to oppressions that circulate in the genre of forms themselves. I will discuss examples of how rhetorical agitators [and introverts] can use a variety of texts and strategies, from discursive, to embodied, to visual means on the mundane and simultaneously public/private space/screen of paper and electronic forms, to speak out against and record injustices that bear remedying. Injustices may range from sociocultural macro-to micro-aggressions, including but not limited to biases related to racism, ethnocentrism, agism, gender bias, sex bias or LGBTQ+ status, (Murray, 2016), to xenophobia, to the absenting and forgetting processes that deny historical documentation of violence against disenfranchised citizens (Wimmer, 2015), and many other kinds of oppressions that circulate in Foucaultian power diffusions across and through social norms and their reinforcement via forms. Forms are legal documents that require little legal expertise beyond common sense and a steely will to record and agitate rhetorically against the tiny yet cumulative daily inequities and injustices that build up across one's lifetime within myriad forms as bureaucracies' paper and electronic edifices.

This is my blurb for my upcoming Fall 2019 graduate course on Communication & Social Movements.  If you have any suggestions for scintillating readings that grad students will be more likely to read and engage with, i'm all ears, contact me on my BGSU email.  See my contact info. at BGSU's Communication Program faculty listing.