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Rhetoric and the Global Turn in Higher Education pp 135–162Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Seeing Precarity: Rhetorical Citizenship, Global Images, and Rhetorical Ethics in the Global Classroom

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Part of the book series: Rhetoric, Politics and Society ((RPS))

Abstract

This chapter examines how transnational networks and rhetorics condition the ways students perceive rhetorical and ethical obligations toward others and draws together work in visual culture and rhetoric to develop an understanding of rhetorical citizenship as a process of critical spectatorship. The chapter argues for the role of critical spectatorship as a process of transnational rhetorical citizenship. Drawing on contemporary theories of spectatorship, photography, and visual rhetoric, as well as examples from rhetoric classes, the chapter explores rhetorical strategies for enabling students to navigate the difficult ground between representation, ethics, and rhetorical efficacy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hariman and Lucaites define “iconic photographs” as directly related to invocations of citizenship: “In short, images in the public media display the public to itself. They also put the state and other institutions on display and valorize some behaviors over others. Thus, the icons offer performative guides for public judgment and action, although not on behalf of a single political idea” (12). They continue by arguing that “In every case, the iconic image interpolates a form of citizenship that can be imitated” (12).

  2. 2.

    Images of suffering and political violence have been given various names, such as “photographs of agony” (Berger 1980, 37), “intolerable images” (Rancière 2009b, 102), “images of suffering” (Sontag 1977, 20), “atrocity pictures” (Roberts 2014, 54).

  3. 3.

    In addition to Rorty, see Hannah Arendt’s discussion of spectatorship as a form of political action and participation in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

  4. 4.

    See Roy’s webpage UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy for the videos in this series: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/globalpov/

  5. 5.

    Students’ content analysis of a random sample of images of global and local poverty not only revealed a number of revealing codes, but served to further our discussion of rhetorical spectatorship and civic responsibility and provided opportunities for developing strategies of critical spectatorship that prepared them for using images more critically in their future projects. 

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  1. University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Christopher Minnix

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Minnix, C. (2018). Seeing Precarity: Rhetorical Citizenship, Global Images, and Rhetorical Ethics in the Global Classroom. In: Rhetoric and the Global Turn in Higher Education. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71725-8_4

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