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Increased polarization and divisive political speech threaten meaningful civic discussion. This study examines a campus public dialogue to understand how dialogic commitments sustained discursive openings for talking across polarizing positions. Specifically, our analysis identifies three patterns of interaction that constituted sustained openings: conceptual expansion, deliberation of meaning, and dialogic moments. Additionally, we contend two communicative practices extended dialogic commitments: discursive vulnerability and critical reflexivity. Finally, we draw on structuration theory to explain how participants disrupted polarizing political tropes to instead enact rules and resources associated with dialogue. Our analysis asserts a rethinking of polarization as communicative – that is, an enactment of dominant political discourses – and elucidates how students with limited instruction instead sought mutual understanding and authentic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a greater understanding of how the introduction of annual parades into the woman suffrage movement created both rhetorical possibilities and limitations for the women's campaign. Through an analysis of suffragists' use of the parades as an innovative rhetorical strategy with formal limitations, I argue that the parades ultimately were successful in drawing attention to arguments for woman suffrage, but proved problematic for achieving the movement's goals, particularly suffragists' efforts to control the image of their movement and its members. I conclude with a consideration of how the parades' contradictions reflected the larger rhetorical paradox inherent in early twentieth-century gender politics., IN A 1912 STATEMENT written for the New York Tribune, Harriot Stanton Blatch explained why woman suffragists organized annual parades. 'Men and women,' she wrote, 'are moved by seeing marching [...]

This essay examines how and why the lived, experienced, and complicated maternal body matters in influencing public conversations about motherhood. Through analysis of Serena Williams's acts of rhetorical agency (writings, interviews, and celebrity branding), I trace her employment of three distinct, but related, embodied rhetorical strategies–maternal vulnerability, ambivalence, and empowerment. I argue that Serena elevates the "rhetorical saliency" of motherhood at the intersections of race, privilege, power, and celebrity while addressing how we need to think about various issues impacting mothers in a more interconnected way, and how different mothers are (or may be) interconnected because of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines #SayHerName as a case study to analyze how circulation of the hashtag both challenged women's erasure from #BlackLivesMatter discourse and motivated activists to center the stories of Black women killed in police interactions. We introduce the term rhetorical stratification to discern why the #SayHerName hashtag came to matter, and how it remained relevant in the national discourse about police brutality. To do so, we analyze how the #SayHerName movement evolved from the discursive to the material through policy briefs, social media circulation, and citizen journalism, which influenced news framing and initiated greater deliberation about this issue in both the networked public sphere and in local communities. We conclude that this hashtag invitation to digital activists engaged more nuanced perspectives about police brutality and policy reform, influenced the way Black women victims of police violence are covered in the news, and motivated community-based policy proposals addressing necessary changes in local policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]