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The Prettier Doll - Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Paperback)
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The Prettier Doll - Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Paperback)
Series: Rhetoric, Culture & Social Critique
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book examines political rhetoric at the grassroots level.
Starting from a position that ""Democracy depends on details, or
else remains a formal abstraction,"" editors Karen Tracy, James P.
McDaniel, and Bruce Gronbeck argue that a true understanding of the
democratic body politic becomes most intelligible through a close
study of its parts. An academic preference for grandiose, abstract
political theory, the editors contend, undervalues and masks the
patterns of social interaction, strategic discourse, and vernacular
rhetorical resources - a public language, in short - to be found at
the grassroots level and at the core of ""ordinary democracy.""
Each essay focuses on the same local controversy. In 2001, in a
predominantly white Colorado community, a third-grade girl
submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30
adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier.
One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different
colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple
dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white
Barbie. When the student's experiment was banned by school
administrators from the science fair for violating the district's
nondiscrimination policy, an uproar resulted that spread from a
local cable channel to a metropolitan newspaper, the Associated
Press, and the national media. A series of school board meetings
and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of
local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science,
racism, and tensions between foundation values such as liberty,
democracy, and free speech. For the authors of these essays, who
focus principally on speech (verbal exchanges as symbolic action),
the events surrounding ""Barbiegate"" illustrate how individual
acts and communal interpretations of customs, policies, and
ideologies are connected and are fundamental to our understanding
of civic judgment in a democratic state. In addition to the
introduction and essays, appendixes supply transcripts of fourteen
key speeches by citizens and school board members involved in the
debates, as well as a URL where speeches may be viewed.
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