Search

Rubrics are a commonly used tool to evaluate student work in the introductory communication course. Although rubrics may appear objective, they are continually interpreted by both instructors and students, often reflecting traditional classroom power dynamics. In order to understand how rubrics constrain as well as expand opportunities for the enactment of critical communication pedagogy, we conducted an interpretive analysis of the presentational speaking rubrics used in the introductory communication course at 20 institutions in the United States. In doing so, we identified three levels of rubric context: high, low, and shared. These contexts inform important theoretical and pedagogical implications for the introductory course, as they highlight existing power dynamics, instructor grading practices, and student agency.

The Instagram Activism Slideshow helps undergraduate students bridge theory and practice by connecting the media arguments they see in their daily lives to the principles of policy argument they learn in argumentation courses. Students use a relevant argumentation theory or concept to argue for a public policy in a concise and palatable Instagram "slideshow" format. The Instagram Activism Slideshow engages students with a highly relevant media context, equips students with a meaningful product for their professional portfolios, and teaches students how to leverage argumentation for advocacy. Courses: This assignment is suitable to relevant upper-division undergraduate communication courses related to argumentation, social and digital media messaging, civic participation, social justice, and public policy. Relevant courses might include argumentation and debate, argumentation and advocacy, argumentation and public policy, and social media campaigns. Objectives: The purpose of this assignment is to assist students in: (1) understanding how stock issues arguments apply to public policy rhetoric; (2) effectively planning, creating, and presenting multimedia arguments; and (3) analyzing and evaluating public policy arguments.

Social movements require participatory dissent. Facing tensions between ideological purity and mass popularity, movements that desire to be politically effective and act in the interest of their participants need dissent that leads to revision instead of conflict that devolves to dissolution. Using three examples from the 2017 and 2019 Women's Marches, this essay theorizes "disparticipation." Building from José Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications, I define disparticipation as participatory, disidentifying dissent. While disparticipants may be seen as not participating, or even counter-protesting, I reframe their participation as a "diss" of a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Disparticipants dissent from binary oppositions of popular/pure and reformist/radical and disidentify to promote coalition-building. Women's March disparticipants dissed white feminist racism, cissexism, and antisemitism. Disparticipation generates discourse that can expand the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the differences between 5 commonly used methods to calculate leg stiffness over a range of running velocities. Thirteen male, habitually rearfoot, recreational runners ran on a force instrumented treadmill for a 5-minute running session. Each session consisted of 30-second intervals at 6 progressively faster speeds from 2.5 m·s−1 through 5.0 m·s−1 with each interval speed increasing by 0.5 m·s−1. Two-way within-factors repeated-measures analyses of variance were used to evaluate leg stiffness and length. A one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the slope of each trend line of each model across speeds. Pearson correlations were used to compare the relationship between the different computational methods. The results indicated that the direct stiffness methods increased with speed whereas the indirect stiffness methods did not. The direct methods were strongly correlated with each other as were the indirect methods. However, there were no strong correlations between the direct and indirect methods. These differences can be mostly attributed to how each individual stiffness method calculated leg length. It is important for researchers to understand these differences when conducting future studies and comparing past studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification, control, tracking, and optimization capacities of technology to manage everyday interactions. Through the analysis of viral self-help Twitter threads, a mobile application, and an algorithmic prototype we trace how the resulting habituation rewards happiness, efficiency, and uniformity at the expense of moodiness, messiness, and difference. Ultimately, we argue that going off scripts and embracing the "fuck up" can help resist technoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the controversy surrounding bell hooks and Lemonade to contend with the neoliberal constraints of digital, feminist, public intellectual argumentation. I argue that hooks's critique reveals her killjoy rhetorical style. Drawn from Sara Ahmed's theorization of the feminist killjoy, hooks's killjoy style provides a rhetorical interruption that reshapes the affective orientations of feminist communities. Its snappy affect opens up the potentiality for critical feminist theory amid the challenges of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]