Papers by Thomas Discenna
James Fredal, The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning, and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric
International Journal of Communication, Feb 25, 2021
Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Rhetoric, and the Cognitariat
Discourses of Denial, 2017
Contingent Academics and the Denial of Academic Labor
Discourses of Denial, 2017
Higher Education and the Denial of Labor
Discourses of Denial, 2017
The Student Athlete as Laborer
Discourses of Denial, 2017
The Strangeness of Academic Labor
The Professoriate and Its Critics
Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chavez, and Robert Glenn Howard (Eds.), Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method
International Journal of Communication, 2017
Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton (Eds.), Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies
International Journal of Communication, 2017
Capital & Class, 2015
Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is dif... more Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is difficult to reconcile the opening images of Grace Lee's film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with its opening monologue. As a seemingly fragile old woman pushes a walker past the desolate ruins of Detroit's Packard plant, we hear her say, 'I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit.' The initial temptation is to read the opening ironically, as in Mark Binelli's (2012) Detroit City is the Place to Be, or any of the other versions of Detroit as urban dystopia that plague our popular consciousness. This sense of irony is reinforced by the filmmaker's frequent use of dissolves that juxtapose images of Detroit's past as a bustling, thriving, racially segregated metropolis with its present as a partially deserted majority black city. However, irony is not a trope to describe the life of activist, thinker and revolutionary Grace L...
Christina R. Foust, Amy Pason and Kate Zittlow Rogness (Eds.), What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics
International Journal of Communication, 2018
Graduate Student Unionization
Discourses of Denial, 2017
Rhetoric's ghost at Davos
Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 2014
This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassir... more This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.
The Discourses of Free Labor: Career Management, Employability, and the Unpaid Intern
Western Journal of Communication, 2016
Employing Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this essay analyzes the discourses surr... more Employing Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this essay analyzes the discourses surrounding college internships. As universities continue to promote internships as an educational experience and pathway to career success, this study highlights the way that such practices contribute to the rising problem of income inequality by inculcating in some of our youngest workers the expectation that free labor is necessary for employment success. Specifically, the discourses of unpaid internships construct a laboring subject that willingly accedes to the demand to remain “employable” through a strategy of career management.
The Culture Industries
A Companion to Popular Culture, 2016
In Defense of Grids: Academic Labor and Academic Freedom in the Moment of Complexity
In Mark C. Taylor's recent work on emerging network culture, Taylor claims that extant critic... more In Mark C. Taylor's recent work on emerging network culture, Taylor claims that extant critical theories have exhausted themselves due to their engagement with and reliance upon an outmoded structuralism that he labels a "grids." A grid, according to Taylor, represents an antiquated mode of thinking based upon the construction of binary oppositions that no longer have relevance in contemporary culture. Such binaries as East/ West, for-profit/not-for-profit, and hegemonic/sub-altern reflect a mode of thinking whose rigidity is ill-adapted to contend with the rapidity of change brought about by the transformations made possible by network communication systems. "The grid is the figure of modernism" (25). Although critical theory?as represented in such key figures as Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard?attempts to resist the dominance of structur alism, its engagement with grid-logic renders it incapable of such resis tance as it collapses all distinctions to one pole or the other of a set of traditional binary oppositions. "Though critics repeatedly claim to re cover difference, their arguments always come down to the same: systems and structures inevitably totalize by excluding difference and repressing otherness [...] At this moment, theory, as it recently has been understood, reaches a dead end" (48). Critical theory remains mired in the grid-logic of modernism in spite of its pretensions toward overcoming the very binaries that it seeks to resist. In stark contrast, the network culture that is currently struggling to take hold elides all such oppositions through the logic of complexity. "The transition from modern industrial to contemporary network culture does not involve a shift from one to the other pole of a stable polar structure. The technologies of production and reproduction in network
International Journal of Communication, Oct 26, 2011
As the job crisis of the early-to mid-1990s rolled across college campuses, fundamentally alterin... more As the job crisis of the early-to mid-1990s rolled across college campuses, fundamentally altering the higher education employment landscape, a rich, incisive and belligerent literature emerged that at once decried and challenged the pernicious effects of the reserve army of underemployed yet highly trained, well-qualified, recently minted PhDs on the academic labor market. In journals such as Social Text and a wide array of disciplinary outlets, scholars described the changing culture of the academy as corporatization and identified, among its many effects, that the "content of work in the academy-of curriculum development, research, and service-is shifting and being redefined" (Rhoades & Slaughter, 1997, p. 9). Moreover, as graduate students took to the streets to protest the changing conditions of their own labor and the diminished prospects for future employment, even mainstream media outlets took notice of the job crisis, noting that the work of the academy had been transfigured by the overproduction of PhDs amid a dearth of tenure-track appointments. For a time, it appeared that the corporatization of higher education had become something of a cottage industry, producing critical analyses and vehement protests even if little of it seemed to help stem the tide. And yet, in spite of what is certainly a fundamental transformation of the higher education landscape, scant attention seems to have been paid in the field of communication. In what appears to be a stunning case of what Cherwitz and Hikins (2000), admittedly in a different context, identified as rhetoric's tendency toward "provincialism," there has been hardly a mention of the notion of corporatization in the communication field, even as other disciplines have identified it as among the foremost crises in contemporary intellectual life. In part, communication's apparent indifference to the corporatization of the academy, and concomitant issues of academic labor, is merely a corollary to what Mosco and McKercher (2009) recently identified as a more general neglect of labor in all its variations: "It is probably accurate to conclude that if, as the media theorist Dallas Smythe (1977) famously remarked, communication is the blind spot of Western Marxism, then labor remains a blind spot of communication studies" (p. 21). Denning (2004) accounts for communication's indifference to labor by noting that as part of the "cultural turn," the field came to define its primary object of study as culture rather than work or labor: "Work and culture seem to be opposite in a number of ways. Culture is seen as the equivalent of leisure, not labor; the symbolic, not the material; shopping and tourism, not jobs; sex, desire, and fantasy, not work" (p. 91). In part, this apparent separation between culture and labor is born of renowned cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams' appropriation of two historical senses of the notion 1844 Thomas A. Discenna
Film Review: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by Grace Lee
Capital & Class, 2015
Apprenticed or exploited: Critical rhetoric and the Yale grade strike
This study is an examination of the 1995 labor action at Yale University where graduate student/i... more This study is an examination of the 1995 labor action at Yale University where graduate student/instructors withheld grades in the classes they taught in order to win recognition of their union. Applying the concepts of a Gramscian critical rhetoric this study seeks to extend the critical rhetoric project through an examination of the role of the specific intellectual in the critical act as well as the social context of intellectual work. Through a conceptualization of the Yale strike as emblematic of a wider movement among graduate student/instructors across the country this study employs a social movements approach to place the strike in its appropriate context. Two questions are addressed by this research: (1) what rhetorical strategies did unionists at Yale employ to win recognition of their newfound identity as workers and; (2) what effect did these strategies have on the Yale administration as well as the wider community including the movement for graduate employee unionizatio...
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Papers by Thomas Discenna