In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company's movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people. This study of Ford's corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford's filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company's early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs. Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.

Political debates have reached unprecedented levels of interest around the globe as more individuals begin to comprehend government proceedings and discourse. Utilizing this knowledge, individuals are becoming attentive to political language, but they lack information on the motivation behind it. Argumentation and Appraisal in Parliamentary Discourse seeks to interrogate the argumentation practices and appraisal forms realized in parliamentary discourse on various topics. While highlighting topics that include legislative immunity, political rivalry, and language evolution, it features crucial discourse-pragmatic research on parliamentary proceedings from various parliamentary settings. This book is recommended for linguists, politicians, professionals, and researchers working in the fields of discourse analysis, linguistics, politics, communication sciences, sociology, and conversational analysis.

This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life-not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's fight for water, deep ecologists' Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists' positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy-vital advocacy-expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.

The loss of credibility of traditional media and democratic institutions points to the important challenges for the democratic system. Social networks have allowed new political and social actors to disseminate their messages, which has raised diversity. However, it has also lowered the standards for the circulation of messages and has increased disinformation and hate speech. Contemporary Politics, Communication, and the Impact on Democracy addresses communication and politics and the impact on democracy. This book offers a valuable contribution regarding the challenges and threats faced by traditional and stable democracies while disinformation, polarization, and populism have a main role in the present hybrid communicative scenario. Covering topics such as digital authoritarianism, emotional and rational frames, and political conflict on social media, this is an essential resource for political scientists, communication specialists, analysts, policymakers, politicians, critical media scholars, graduate students, professors, researchers, and academicians.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play, vividly presents children's voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children's lives. What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression. Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

By Degrees: Resilience, Relationships, and Success in Communication Graduate Studies provides readers with an indispensable guide to navigating the graduate school experience in Communication Studies programs. The book helps current and future graduate students consider their options, make wise choices, and thrive within their master's or doctoral programs and beyond. The text's 15 contributed chapters discuss such topics as how to select the right program, build strong advisor-advisee relationships, navigate roadblocks, find community, share work, develop into competent scholars and teachers, and pursue careers inside and outside the academy. The diverse and global nature of communication research and pedagogy and finding and pursuing your passion within the discipline is evident throughout the book. Designed to resonate with today's learners, each chapter is co-authored by leading scholars and current or recent graduate students and features unique perspectives from students' experiences. This approach provides readers with an enlightening window into graduate students' insights, challenges, and lived experiences. The text also features a distinct emphasis on diversity, inclusion, equity, and access, and reflects upon the international character of communication research and pedagogy. Readers will engage in robust discussions related to justice and equity and learn how the Communication discipline has developed and continues to develop around the globe. By Degrees is an exemplary resource for introduction to graduate studies courses and for individuals considering master's or doctoral programs.

During the Brexit referendum campaign it became clear how easily national conversations around politics could become raucous and bitter. This book explores the nature of talking about politically contentious issues and how our society can begin to develop a more constructive culture of political talk. Uniquely, this study focuses on citizens own experiences and reflections on developing, practising and evaluating their own political voices. Based on seventy in-depth interviews with a diverse range of people, Stephen Coleman explores the intricate nature of interpersonal political talk and what this means for public attitudes towards politics and how people negotiate their political identities. Engaging with a broad range of subjects from Political Communication to Sociology this book offers valuable insight into how the public can discuss politically turbulent topics in a meaningful and constructive way.

Authors Joann Keyton and Stephenson J. Beck present a communicative framework-one that emphasizes the creation and management of messages as well as the reception and perception of meaning- for the investigation of groups and teams. The book also elaborates on the strategic and contextual nature of group interaction. The book is structured around five key elements of groups, all pieces of a puzzle, that can be used to evaluate group effectiveness. These are: group size, interdependence of members, group identity, group goals, and group structure. Throughout the book, and in pedagogical features, skills are grounded in a solid research base (and further highlighted in Skill Builder and Theory Standout boxes). Examples are extensive and true-to-life, with many utilizing transcripts of group dialogues so students can see the communication process unfold (Message and Meaning boxes). A wide range of group types is presented, from family and social groups, to work teams and task groups, to discussion and decision-making groups. Whether students' experiences are with groups that are formal or informal, personal or professional, task oriented or relationally oriented, they need communication skills to build and maintain relationships that support effective problem solving and decision making. Building on the strengths of previous editions, robust enhancements to this edition include new chapter opening stories; examples of a wider variety of group types from in-person to hybrid to virtual; the inclusion of new trends and research; and updated instructor and Active Learning resources.