Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship

Abstract

Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alternatives to the established order. I then explicate how rhetorical scholars have deployed counterpublic theory to produce critical analyses of the dynamics of multiple publics, inclusion-exclusion, and equality-inequality. Looking forward to future scholarship, I issue a methodological call for fieldwork as a complement to textual analysis as well as explorations of locally and transnationally situated publics.

Patriotism and Islam on social media: How Pakistani publics revisit their allegiance to the state

“…Drawing on prior research by Asen (2015), Hamdy and Gomma (2012), Jackson and Welles (2016), Rambukanna (2015) and Papachirissi and Oliveira (2012), I also trace engagement patterns of hashtag publics that emerged as a result of the disappearance of the activists. I have collected data and evaluated instances of public sphering (of whatever nature; rough, emergent, insurgent), from 7 th January (when abducted) to 27 th January (when the activists returned).…”

Neoliberalism and the rhetorical invention of counterpublic attunement

“…When practices that make sense in theory fail in practice, scholars must rethink even their most enduring tenants. As Asen (2015) elsewhere explores, the mutually informing relationship between publics scholarship and its enactment must be infused with the “self-reflexive spirit of critical theory” (p. 142). This reflection can be approached, as Dana Cloud and Kathleen Feyh (2015) suggest, through an inquiry into the fidelity between emotional identifications and rational political positions.…”

“…Fieldwork, a method that Robert Asen wishes were more utilized in public scholarship, similarly extends knowledge at the same time it reinvents bodies. From Asen’s (2015) perspective, fieldwork provides access to inchoate argument formation; from the perspective of new materialism, it puts scholars in proximity with other bodies and their processes of becoming public subjects. More than third-party observers, field researchers inevitably participate in self-subjectification by engaging in the diverse experiences of others.…”

The Great Chain of Being: Manifesto on the Problem of Agency in Science Communication

“…We noted a need, however, to engage scholars outside the orbit of rhetoric of science to make progress in solving the problem of public agency. Scholars from fields including public relations and critical theory have recently attempted to initiate just such a conversation (Heath, Waymer, and Palenchar, 2013;Asen, 2015). Sociology, anthropology, and philosophy also conceptualize publics in ways that may help rhetoricians.…”