This book advances the trend toward field methods in rhetorical scholarship by collecting distinct chapters based on the same object of study - the University of Nevada, Reno's Masterplan that extends the University into the adjacent community. Exploring the perennial problem of university-community relations from the perspective of multiple publics, this book provides thick description of a local issue that resonates with communities across the country. The fieldwork for each chapter was conducted in groups during a single, week-long site visit that asked scholars to study the asymmetrical traction among different communities to organize, publicize, and advocate positions around a proposed redevelopment project. Surveying the results of this professional experiment - the Project on Power, Place, and Publics - each chapter offers a theoretical intervention into the same material site, illustrates diverse place-based field methods, and models the scholarly results of work that mixes slow, deliberate, and thoughtful analysis with the fast pace and spontaneous demands of participatory research. This volume is unique for a number of reasons: it is the only study to concretely illustrate the compatibility of field methods with a wide range of theoretical perspectives; it attests to the possibility of deeply collaborative research as teams of researchers engaged multiple local partners to produce these chapters; and, it challenges the pervasive intellectual terrain that pits one theory against another by showing how diverse scholarly approaches can bolster one another. With a new introduction, afterword, and post-script material from authors, the other chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Review of Communication.

Throughout the political spectrum, successful arguments often rely on fear appeals, whether implicit or explicit. Dominant arguments prey on people's fears - of economic failure, cultural backwardness, or lack of personal safety. Counterarguments feed on other fears, suggesting that audiences are being duped by emotional smokescreens. With chapters on the political, institutional, and cultural manifestations of fear, this book offers diverse investigations into how insecurity and the search for certainty shape contemporary political economic decisions, and explores how the rhetorical manipulation of such fears illuminates a larger struggle for social control.

What explains the "triumph of capitalism"? Why do people so often respond positively to discussions favoring it while shutting down arguments against it? Overwhelmingly theories regarding capitalism's resilience have focused on individual choice bolstered by careful rhetorical argumentation. In this penetrating study, however, Catherine Chaput shows that something more than choice is at work in capitalism's ability to thrive in public practice and imagination--more even than material resources (power) and cultural imperialism (ideology). That "something," she contends, is market affect. Affect, says Chaput, signifies a semi-autonomous entity circulating through individuals and groups. Physiological in nature but moving across cultural, material, and environmental boundaries, affect has three functions: it opens or closes individual receptivity; it pulls or pushes individual identification; and it raises or lowers individual energies. This novel approach begins by connecting affect to rhetorical theory and offers a method for tracking its three modalities in relation to economic markets. Each of the following chapters compares a major theorist of capitalism with one of his important critics, beginning with the juxtaposition of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who Set the agenda not only for arguments endorsing and critiquing capitalism but also for the affective energies associated with these positions. Subsequent chapters restage this initial debate through pairs of economic theorists--John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek and Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith--who represent key historical moments. In each case, Chaput demonstrates, capitalism's critics have fallen short in their rhetorical effectiveness. Chaput concludes by exploring possibilities for escaping the straitjacket imposed by these debates. In particular she points to the biopolitical lectures of Michel Foucault as offering a framework for more persuasive anticapitalist critiques by reconstituting people's conscious understandings as well as their natural instincts.