No abstract

This essay recovers the communication pedagogy that the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) developed as part of their outreach to immigrant men in the industries in the early-20thcentury U.S.A. It brings into focus how the YMCA's teaching techniques negotiated the relation between labor and labor power by configuring sound, speech, and class subjectivity in a way that put in motion a form of productive affect. From this material history, the essay prompts reflection on the ways that sound continues to configure ever-shifting modes of productivity and exploitation, inviting scholars to critically consider the role of communication pedagogy in the evolving contexts of capitalism.

In 1996, some seven years after the fall of communism, Egoist emerged as the undisputed leader in the genre of lifestyle magazines in Bulgaria. It negotiated local gender discourses with the import of Western consumer culture. Most significantly, the magazine transformed its target demographic into a socially recognizable "new generation" tasked with steering the direction of the postcommunist transition. This paper explores the formation, gender dynamics, and political significance of this "new generation." It demonstrates how by organizing the "new generation"-aesthetically, culturally, and politically-around gendered practices of production and consumption, Egoist harmonized the advent of homo economicus with the available sex/gender system. Thus, the magazine helped create the affective conditions for the emergence of a society with little aspiration or capacity to produce an alternative socio-political order that could avoid the pitfalls of imported market ideologies.

Recording not filtering out, describing not disciplining, these are the Laws and the Prophets.Bruno Latour (2005: 55) Focusing on the historical controversies surrounding the development of the print records of the U.S. congressional debates, this essay explores how human, technological, and discursive agencies come together to constitute institutional argumentative practice. Examining the U.S. Congressional Record through the lens of Bruno Latour's concept of dingpolitik reveals that as a technology of representation print records work less as mediators and more as agents of institutional contextualization. Print records do more than translate arguments from oral to written form or transfer arguments from the public sphere to the state. Rather, they assemble the disparate elements that constitute the terrains of governance, the character of political issues, and the norms of congressional deliberation. Hence, the material dynamics of congressional deliberation prompt not only a reconsideration of what and who is being represented by Congress, but also a methodological reorientation from normative to constitutive perspectives on institutional argumentation.

No abstract