This book explores the practices in a Zen Buddhist temple located in Northwest Ohio against the backdrop of globalization. Drawing on the previous studies on Buddhist modernization and westernization, it provides a better understanding of the westernization of Buddhism and its adapted practices and rituals in the host culture. Using rhetorical criticism methodology, the author approaches this temple as an embodiment of Buddhist rhetoric with both discursive and non-discursive expressions within the discourses of modernity. By analyzing the rhetorical practices at the temple through abbots' teaching videos, the temple website, members' dharma names, and the materiality of the temple space and artifacts, the author discovers how Buddhist rhetoric functions to constitute and negotiate the religious identities of the community members through its various rituals and activities. At the same time, the author examines how the temple's space and settings facilitate the collective the formation and preservation of the Buddhist identity. Through a nuanced discussion of Buddhist rhetoric, this book illuminates a new rhetorical methodology to understand religious identity construction. Furthermore, it offers deeper insights into the future development of modern Buddhism, which are also applicable to Buddhist practitioners and other major world religions.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent. Using three cases that involve an exploration of the corporeal influence of the green spaces and commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts; the cartographic texts produced by GPS devices; and two maps involved in a federal court case about marine mammal protection, this book explores and tests the value of what Propen calls "visual-material rhetorics," or a visual rhetoric more expressly attuned to studies of space, the body, and materiality. Grounding all three cases is a theoretical approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias with Carole Blair's theory of material rhetoric. Such an approach brings Foucault's important work on spatiality into conversation with visual-material rhetorics to show how we benefit from conceptualizing rhetorical objects as not merely textual in the traditional sense but also as both visual and material-as spatial. Together, the cases in this book demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences and how visual-material rhetorics function in the service of advocacy. AMY D. PROPEN is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota. Her research on visual rhetoric, critical cartographies, and rhetoric as advocacy has appeared in journals and edited collections, including Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, ACME: An International E-Journal of Critical Geographies, and Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. She is co-author, with Mary Lay Schuster, of Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases.

Joining the debate on gender differences, this book presents a cross-section of current research in communication, language, and gender studies. The first part presents studies that ask how women and men differ on a range of communication variables and suggest reasons for these differences. The second part offers a variety of critiques of masculine cultural hegemony. The third part envisions how gender differences may be reconceptualized in order to open key cultural institutions to honor both women and men. Taken as a whole, the chapters inform one another in a creative, dialectical tension. Examining what researchers mean by gender differences and values implicit in the term is critical to understanding current trends in gender studies.

When the new medium of CD-ROMs emerged, industry figures and critics alike proclaimed their virtually unlimited potential. Adapting material from well-established media like television and film, CD-ROMs have quickly transformed genres such as science fiction and horror. At the same time, the realities of actual CD-ROMs often fall short of their utopian visions.

On a Silver Platter marks a "coming of age" for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically significant medium demanding critical attention. Greg Smith brings together media scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to analyze how CD-ROMs offer alternatives to familiar places--to museums, to cities, and especially to classrooms. Examining specific CD-ROM titles, including, Sim City, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the contributors argue that CD-ROMs are complex texts worthy of close consideration, both for how they have changed our understanding of space and genre, and for how they will impact the development of future media.

By examining particular CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for insight and understanding into the current state of multimedia and into the future of technology.

Like every discipline, Rhetorical Studies relies on a technical vocabulary to convey specialized concepts, but few disciplines rely so deeply on a set of terms developed so long ago. Pathos, kairos, doxa, topos-these and others originate from the so-called classical world, which has conferred on them excessive authority. Without jettisoning these rhetorical terms altogether, this handbook addresses critiques of their ongoing relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects. A New Handbook of Rhetoric inverts the terms of classical rhetoric by applying to them the alpha privative, a prefix that expresses absence. Adding the prefix - to more than a dozen of the most important terms in the field, the contributors to this volume build a new vocabulary for rhetorical inquiry. Essays on apathy, akairos, adoxa, and atopos, among others, explore long-standing disciplinary habits, reveal the denials and privileges inherent in traditional rhetorical inquiry, and theorize new problems and methods. Using this vocabulary in an analysis of current politics, media, and technology, the essays illuminate aspects of contemporary culture that traditional rhetorical theory often overlooks. Innovative and groundbreaking, A New Handbook of Rhetoric at once draws on and unsettles ancient Greek rhetorical terms, opening new avenues for studying values, norms, and phenomena often stymied by the tradition. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Caddie Alford, Benjamin Firgens, Cory Geraths, Anthony J. Irizarry, Mari Lee Mifsud, John Muckelbauer, Bess R. H. Myers, Damien Smith Pfister, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Alessandra Von Burg.

Many educators have been looking for a fundamentally different approach to engage young people and encourage progress in learning. Supported by recent public policy developments, a transformation is beginning to take place in the practice of many schools. The focus of learning is shifting away from the child as an individual in a classroom detached from the surrounding neighbourhood to a learning community that embraces carers and families as well as young people and teachers. This monograph analyses the organising principles of this cultural transformation and considers how it will shape learning in schools and communities throughout the world. The book brings together key thinkers from the fields of new learning, new communities of educational practice and new forms of educational governance. Arguing for the necessary interconnectedness of pedagogy, institutions and governance, this ground-breaking book will undoubtedly shape the policy agenda in this area for years to come. >

The creative citizen unbound introduces the concept of 'creative citizenship' to explore the potential of civically-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy. Contributors examine the value and nature of creative citizenship, not only in terms of its contribution to civic life and to social capital but also to various and more contested definitions of value, both economic and cultural.

Political campaigns are highly complex and sophisticated communication events: communication of issues, images, social reality, and persons. They are essential exercises in the creation, re-creation, and transmission of significant symbols through human communication. As voters and others involved with the campaigns attempt to make sense of the political environment, political bits of communication inform voting choices, world views, and legislative desires.

The essays in this book examine the key elements in that process throughout the 1996 presidential campaign. Each focuses on a specific area of political campaign communication: the communication functions and activities across the campaign phases from nomination conventions through the debates, political advertising, the discussion and framing of issues, images of the candidates and their wives, the role and impact of network and local news, political cartoons, and the digital/on-line arena. This text will appeal to students and scholars alike as well as to concerned citizens involved with presidential politics and political campaigns.

The United States Supreme Court famously labeled copyright "the engine of free expression" because it provides a vital economic incentive for much of the literature, commentary, music, art, and film that makes up our public discourse. Yet today's copyright law also does the opposite--it is often used to quash news reporting, political commentary, church dissent, historical scholarship, cultural critique, and artistic expression.
In Copyright's Paradox, Neil Weinstock Netanel explores the tensions between copyright law and free speech, revealing how copyright can impose unacceptable burdens on expression. Netanel provides concrete illustrations of how copyright often prevents speakers from effectively conveying their message, tracing this conflict across both traditional and digital media and considering current controversies such as the remix and copying culture rampant on YouTube and MySpace, hip-hop music and digital sampling, and the Google Book Search litigation. The author juxtaposes the dramatic expansion of copyright holders' proprietary control against the individual's newly found ability to digitally cut, paste, edit, remix, and distribute sound recordings, movies, TV programs, graphics, and texts the world over. He tests whether, in light of these developments and others, copyright still serves as a vital engine of free expression and he assesses how copyright does--and does not--burden speech. Taking First Amendment values as his lodestar, Netanel argues that copyright should be limited to how it can best promote robust debate and expressive diversity, and he presents a blueprint for how that can be accomplished.
Copyright and free speech will always stand in sometension. But there are ways in which copyright can continue to serve as an engine of free expression while leaving ample room for speakers to build on copyrighted works to convey their message, express their personal commitments, and create new art. This book shows us how.

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.

This text develops an approach to international political economy that focuses on culture. It examines Chilean communication scholarship as it developed under shifting political regimes and changing international political economic relations. The book explains the importance of agency and culture in the political processes of building and challenging transnational hegemony, emphasizing the role of intellectuals.

This book examines a writing activity that has recently fallen into disrepute. Outlining has a bad reputation among students, even though many teachers and textbooks still recommend the process. In part, the author argues, the medium is to blame. Paper and ink make the revision difficult. But if one uses an electronic outliner, the activity can be very helpful in developing a thoughtful and effective document, particularly one that spans many pages and deals with a complicated subject. Outlining Goes Electronic takes an historical approach, examining the way people developed the idea of outlining, from the classical period to the present. We see that the medium in which people worked strongly shaped their assumptions, ideas, and use of outlines. In developing a theoretical model of outlining as an activity, the author argues that a relatively new electronic tool-software that accelerates and performs the process of outlining-can give us a new perspective from which to engage previous classroom models of writing, recent writing theory, and current practice in the technical writing field.

Gring-Pemble asserts that the role of language in shaping policy options is rarely studied and poorly understood. She seeks to analyze congressional hearings and debates on welfare to understand the role of language in framing welfare policy and contemporary welfare discussions. She reviews welfare history in the United States and provides a rhetorical analysis of welfare deliberations. In the process she illustrates the significance of language and ideology in shaping American social policy outcomes.

This highly original, thought-provoking book - written by a pioneer of communication studies - is the first to analyze the post 9/11 world in terms of global media and popular culture.
Written in an engaging and candid manner by a leading expert in this field
Argues that cross-cultural understanding can only be achieved by harnessing the power of global media, popular culture, information technology, and personal communications technologies
Examines the global trend of using film, video, music, and TV "on-demand" as the framework through which we experience all cultural activity
Draws inspiration from the work of a range of theorists, from Charles Darwin to Anthony Giddens
Candidly interrogates the very latest developments in world affairs, especially the roles of fundamentalist religious ideology, media globalization, and individualism, whose complex relationships have yet to be explained by social scientists

This unique book systematically examines the interplay among foreign policymakers, the press, and public opinion in the process of China policy decision making from 1950 to 1984. Readers will benefit from the findings that, through 35 years of Sino-American relations, the press helps perpetuate the illusion that has existed in the public mind since 1950. The comprehensive analysis allows readers to understand hoe the press shapes and is shaped by foreign policy decisions.

As society becomes more culturally diverse and globally connected, churches and seminaries are rapidly changing. And as the church changes, preaching must change too. Crossover Preaching proposes a way forward through conversation with the "dean of the nation's black preachers," Gardner C. Taylor, senior pastor emeritus of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. In this richly interdisciplinary study, Jared E. Alcantara argues that an analysis of Taylor's preaching reveals an improvisational-intercultural approach that recovers his contemporary significance and equips US churches and seminary classrooms for the future. Alcantara argues that preachers and homileticians need to develop intercultural and improvisational proficiencies to reach an increasingly intercultural church. Crossover Preaching equips them with concrete practices designed to help them cultivate these competencies and thus communicate effectively in a changing world.

While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. "America's Darwin" fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin's works.

The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines--literature, history of science, women's studies, geology, biology, entomology, and anthropology. All pay close attention to the specific forms that Darwinian evolution took in the United States, engaging not only with Darwin's most famous works, such as "On the Origin of Species," but also with less familiar works, such as "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals."

Each contributor considers distinctive social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that affected the reception and dissemination of evolutionary thought, from before the publication of "On the Origin of Species" to the early years of the twenty-first century. These essays engage with the specific details and language of a wide selection of Darwin's texts, treating his writings as primary sources essential to comprehending the impact of Darwinian language on American writers and thinkers. This careful engagement with the texts of evolution enables us to see the broad points of its acceptance and adoption in the American scene; this approach also highlights the ways in which writers, reformers, and others reconfigured Darwinian language to suit their individual purposes.

"America's Darwin" demonstrates the many ways in which writers and others fit themselves to a narrative of evolution whose dominant motifs are contingency and uncertainty. Collectively, the authors make the compelling case that the interpretation of evolutionary theory in the U.S. has always shifted in relation to prevailing cultural anxieties.

Online support groups are considered highly valuable in addition to traditional health care services, but we know very little about how people actually join such a group. This book offers a microanalysis of an online support group on eating disorders, specifically the communication through textual messages between newcomers and regular members and members' nicknames. The study uses an ethnomethodological and conversation analytical approach to show that members of online support groups treat the group as a community in which their illness-identity is highly relevant. It appears that members invoke community norms regarding legitimacy for newcomers: Newcomers are expected to admit that they are ill, but this is a very difficult step for those who have not yet fully adopted the "sick role" (Parsons, 1951). In the field of eating disorders, it is particularly difficult for people that tend to "pro-ana," i.e. the glamorization of eating disorders. The insecurity and anxiety that newcomers display as they enter the online group could probably be relieved when a special entry subforum would be installed in which they can take time and space to actually recognize that they are ill.

From "Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western" is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film.
Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre
Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present
Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires
Deepens an audience's understanding of the genre's most important works, including "Shane, Stagecoach," "The Searchers, Unforgiven," and "Kill Bill"
Contains numerous illustrations of the films and issues discussed.

The first part of this new book concentrates on the office automation phenomenon. Chapter 1 sketches some of its disappointments and sets the stage for the chapters to follow. In Chapter 2, the author argues that images of organization incorporate what has been called a worldview and are thus inevitably relativistic in their orientation. This allows the author to criticize some common assumptions about the nature of organization, but it equally introduces a theme that is central to his theory, and that will be picked up again in a later chapter. Chapter 3 gets to the heart of his criticism of conventional theories of communication process, and in doing so allows the author to demonstrate the feet of clay of one of the sacred cows of our time: the concept of office work as information processing. The second part is concerned with theory and its implications. Chapter 4 describes the event of communication, in microcosm. Chapter 5 is an attempt to give this perception a more systematic presentation. Chapter 6 tries to understand the problem of operationalizing the theory, as a means to understanding, and studying the dynamics of conversation and of communication mediated through texts. Chapter 7 explores one implication of the theory, namely, the maintenance of requisite variety, within a conversational system. Chapter 8 concludes the presentation by a consideration of some of the implications of the theory for the conduct of research.

This collection focuses on the multi-layered links between international events and identity discourses. With a unique line-up of international scholars, this book offers a diverse range of exciting case studies, including sports competitions, music festivals, exhibitions, fashion shows and royal celebrations.