Student and professor publish joint article on rhetoric and terrorism

A paper, “Arguing War in an Era of Terrorism: ‘Democracy to Come’ and Critical Pedagogy,” by rhetoric and communication studies professor Kevin Kuswa and a student, BriAnn Walsh, ’06, was published in the journal Controversia.

Walsh, a rhetoric and communication studies major, collaborated with Kuswa on an independent study project while she was a student in his “Rhetoric and Terrorism” course.

The essay attempts to both critique and defend a critical pedagogy informed by Derrida’s concept of a “democracy to come” and Dewey’s advocacy of a politics against war.  Kuswa and Walsh begin by marking our present location in an era of fear and war based on terrorism and counter-terrorism, a time requiring a vision of a radical, even if impossible, democracy.

The authors then join this concept of democracy with a critical pedagogy that includes advocating the abandonment of war and the need to encounter the Other without judgment, without mediating rhetoric. Ultimately, they contend that it is possible to reach for the impossible, making this particular drive for democracy, at least in terms of argumentation studies, a viable response to the binaries defining our era of terrorism.  

Posted February 19, 2008