Communication and Rhetorical Studies

Citizen Participation, Metadiscourse and Accountability: A Public Hearing on a Zoning Change for Wal-Mart

Richard Buttny — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:20:42 PST

During a contentious public hearing on a zoning change for Wal-Mart, participants at times moved to a metadiscursive level with utterances such as, “expect to be listened to,” “I have a question,” or reading quotes of Town Board members from the newspaper. Such metadiscursive references allow participants to attempt to structure, or depart, from the public hearing format. Metadiscursive references also work to criticize their opponents’ speech or the process. Metadiscourse has the consequence of contextualizing the participation framework of the hearing as to topic, length of presentation, and mode of interaction. From a normative perspective, metadiscourse is used to reflect on the folk assumptions about communication as expressed by participants during the public hearing.

Wal-Mart’s presentation to the community: Discursive practices in mitigating risk, limiting public participation, and developing a relationship

Richard Buttny — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:20:41 PST

This study examines Wal-Mart representatives’ presentation to the community on their site plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Given the on-going controversy and criticisms from local residents, it is interesting to see Wal-Mart’s strategies in attenuating these risks and negative impacts. The discursive practices found here are: formulating prior citizen complaints by a neutral-sounding, legalistic language which works euphemistically or as a gloss. Citizen concerns are fitted into a problem-solution format where the solutions involve engineering technology. The Wal-Mart representatives display their expertise through describing these technological answers. Scientific documents or tests are presented which point to counter-intuitive results. They draw on a discourse of “facts” and “information,” but use these to make arguments in support of their proposals. In addition to displaying scientific-technological expertise, they avow openness to dialogue and willingness to work with the town. The Wal-Mart representatives present themselves as both technical experts and trustworthy partners, but they also may be seen as rhetor in using facts, findings, and documents to make an argument for their project.

Accounts of violence from Arabs and Israelis on ABC-TV’s panel discussion from Jerusalem

Richard Buttny et al. — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:20:40 PST

The North American network, ABC-Television, broadcast the news-panel program, Nightline, from Jerusalem during the beginning days of the Second Intifada. One of the main themes of this discussion was the violence, pain, and trauma—the civilians killed or wounded, the military’s actions, and how it all started. Even the horrible facts of violence must be told or narrated and discussed for its morality, causes, consequences, responsibility, and political ramifications. In this sense, violence is discursive. How violence gets told, how versions get constructed or contested is our focus. Participants used the communicative practices of invoking membership categories and activity terms and formulating events in support of their evaluative viewpoint. These membership categories were often presented by the use of conflicting positionings in referencing persons or events. The “conflict” between descriptive terms draws attention to something problematic. Talk of violence also makes relevant reports of affect/feeling. In reporting violence, affect/feeling is reconstructed by participants as both a consequence and a cause of action, to intensify a condition, to raise moral issues, as an obstacle to be overcome, as a shorthand condition to ascribe of another to invite a telling of the events, or to ascribe as an opponent’s political strategy. Such discursive uses of affect/feeling help to make concrete the human costs of violence. In addition, the panelists’ answers were designed, not only to the interviewer or fellow panelists, but to multiple audiences including millions of TV viewers in the USA.

Drawing on the words of others at public hearings: Zoning, Wal-Mart, and the threat to the aquifer

Richard Buttny et al. — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:04:41 PST

This study examines two public hearings on a zoning proposal that would allow the construction of a Super Wal-Mart Center on a field over the town’s aquifer. Many citizens speak out against the zoning change because of the risk to drinking water, as well as other issues. Citizens face the speaker’s problem of how to make their presentations convincing, given the technical matters involved and the fact that Town Board members have likely already heard about these issues. Some speakers draw on the words of others in their presentations. Using another ’s words allows the speaker to cite an authoritative source or to respond to what another has said, to evaluate it, and often to challenge it. Speakers use other devices in addition to quotes, such as formulations, repetition, and membership categorizations to develop their evaluative stances in the reporting context. The study’s focus is the discursive construction and rhetoric of using others’ words for the speaker’s own purposes.