Date of Award
5-10-2026
Date Published
June 2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Advisor(s)
Rachel Hall
Keywords
countermapping;innocence;narrative mapping;political violence;right wing politics;temporal rhetoric
Subject Categories
Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This thesis explores the way political rhetorics of time, morality, and political violence play out in visual representations of the far right in the United States via maps. In Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time, Nomi Claire Lazar argues that governments and political movements use temporal-rhetorical frameworks to generate political legitimacy by associating their movement with time, which is generally understood as natural. I argue that every temporal-rhetorical frame also implies a set of moral codes which are understood to be materially true, despite the fact that our experiences of time are only ever aim-dependent and mediated. In the United States, our politics have become increasingly defined by moral righteousness, and particularly, they pivot on questions of guilt or innocence. Drawing on the recent work of Miriam Ticktin, I bring her work on the politics of innocence in conversation with Lazar’s discussions of the rhetoric of time to diagnose issues in American politics which have made it incredibly difficult to counter right-wing authoritarian political activism in the United States. I extend this into an analysis of how the dispositifs (apparatuses) of “hate” (hate crimes) and terrorism reify a racialized double standard by rendering perpetrators of hate crimes politically and racially innocent rhetorically. Working with Verena Erlenbauch-Anderson’s definition of terrorism as a mechanism of social defense, which allows the state to suspend biopolitical imperatives to free the state to use sovereign power, I theorize hate as a technology of innocence, which reinstates liberal/biopolitical norms without countering white supremacy. By exploring the way this plays out visually in terms of political violence, I attempt to open a conversation about potential solutions through narrative countermapping and in-depth narrative visualization, a developing method I refer to as long exposure.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Herring, Gabriel GR, "Agency at the End of History: Time, terrorism, and technologies of innocence in engaging the far right" (2026). Theses - ALL. 1022.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/1022
