To the humanities: what does communication studies give?

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; (3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; (4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); (5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; (6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and (7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet.

KEYWORDS:

• humanities
• communication studies
• rhetoric
• posthumanism
• digital humanities

Selected further reading

Allen, Danielle, and Jennifer Light, eds. From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Humanities.” European Educational Research Journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 1–19.

———. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture, & Society (May 4, 2018): doi:10.1177/0263276418771486.

Brooks, Peter, and Hilary Jewett, eds. The Humanities and Public Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Bryant, Donald C. “Whither the Humanities?” Quarterly Journal of Speech 42, no. 4 (1956): 363–66.

Cooper, David D. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life. Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

Hall, Stuart. “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities.” The Humanities as Social Technology 53 (Summer 1990): 11–23.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. The Humanities and the Dream of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Harris, Sara Baugh, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano. “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 337–42.

Hénaff, Marcel. “The Humanities, the Arts and the Market.” In Giving and Taking: Antidotes to a Culture of Greed, edited by Joke Brouwer and Sjoerd van Tuinen, 27–42. Rotterdam, Netherlands: V2_Publishing, 2014.

Hutner, Gordon, and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds. A New Deal for the Humanities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Ingraham, Chris. “Theory in a Transdisciplinary Mode: The Rhetoric of Inquiry and Digital Humanities.” Poroi 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–25, Article 7, doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1188.

Ingram, Brett, and Lisa Cuklanz. “The Crisis in the Humanities and Its Relevance to Communication Studies.” Anàlisi. Quaderns de Comunicació i Cultura 54 (2016): 96–108.

Johnstone, Henry W., Jr. “Rhetoric as a Wedge: A Reformulation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1990): 333–38.

Kennerly, Michele, and Damien Smith Pfister, eds. Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

Maurantonio, Nicole. Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, forthcoming 2019.

Mendible, Myra. “Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of ‘Posts’—Rethinking the Human/Race,” Humanities 6, no. 1 (2017): 1–5.

Miller, Toby. Blow Up the Humanities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012.

Rummel, Erika. The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Shome, Raka. “Post-Colonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View.” In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudhill, 591–608. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

Snaza, Nathan, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, and Zofia Zaliwska, eds. Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2016.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Wernimont, Jacqueline. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Wiener, Linda, and Ramsey Eric Ramsey. Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions Science Can't Ask. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many reviewers who offered their wisdom to these essays, and especially those of you who offered extraordinary insight and analysis to support important ideas to fruition in a spirit of deep engagement; to Sohinee Roy for her ever steady, always so kind and keen editorial guidance; to Ramsey Eric Ramsey for being editor extraordinaire and for our years of wondering and wandering conversations, especially the one in that Chicago coffee shop some years ago now that eventuated in this special issue; and to Diane Gruber for the friendship that inspires me daily to think about weaving with our toes. I acknowledge as well the support of the University of Richmond, School of Arts and Sciences Humanities Initiative that allowed me to colead a faculty seminar on the study of the humanities in Fall 2016, during which ideas for this project grew.

Notes

1 See Mary Beard, Women and Power (New York: Liverlight Publishing, 2017). Beard illuminates an ancient history of women being in question, especially when speaking in public, an ancient history still being lived by today. See also Jane Sutton, The House of My Sourjourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

2 Sara Ahmed, “Being in Question,” in Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 115–34; Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

3 I do not emphasize in any way a Christianized or religious notion of faith.

4 In a long legacy of proclamations of crises in the humanities, the latest tell of denigrated attitudes and budgets, 21st-century globalization shifts, professionalization, political divisions, partisan operations, economic crises, inequality, and culture wars. See, for example: Ian Beacock, “Humanist among Machines,” Aeon, June 25, 2015. https://aeon.co/essays/arnold-toynbee-srhines-a-light-on-the-humanities-role-today; Eric Bennett, “Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 13, 2018; Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Julie Ellison, “The Humanities and the Public Soul,” Antipode 40, no. 3 (2008): 463–71; BoatwrightLibrary, “Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Generous Thinking: Why We Need the Humanities, and How to Save Them,’” YouTube.com, February 17, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZmn_XTK3OY; Sylvia Gale and Evan Carton, “Toward the Practice of the Humanities,” The Good Society 14, no. 3 (2005): 38–44; Blaine Greteman, “It's the End of the Humanities as We Know It: And I Feel Fine,” The New Republic, June 13, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118139/crisis-humanities-has-long-history; Don Habibi, “The Indispensability of the Humanities for the 21st Century,” Humanities 5, no. 1 (2016): 1–23; Aaron Hanlon, “Lies about the Humanities—and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2018; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities,’” New Literary History 36, no. 1 (2005): 21–36; Julie Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Elizabeth Lynn, An Ongoing Experiment: State Council, the Humanities, and the American Public (New York: Kettering Foundation, 2013); Peter Mandler, “Rise of the Humanities,” Aeon, December 17, 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/the-humanities-are-booming-only-the-professors-can-t-see-it; Richard Wolin, “Reflections on the Crisis in the Humanities,” The Hedgehog Review 13, no. 2 (2011): https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2011_Summer_Wolin.php.

5 Barbara Biesecker et al., Communication Scholarship and the Humanities (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2007).

6 For engagement of this question, see Armond R. Townes, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” Women's Studies in Communication (2019): doi:10:1080/07491409.2018.1551985; “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” unpublished paper (2018), https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit.

7 USGRP, Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II (Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018), https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/.

8 Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan, “Figures of Entanglement: Special Issue Introduction,” Review of Communication 16, no. 4 (2016): 265.

9 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

10 On even orality as media, see Armond R. Towns, “Rebels of the Underground: Media, Orality, and the Routes of Black Emancipation,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2016): 184–97.

11 See Benjamin Schmidt, “The Humanities Are in Crisis,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018; “Mea Culpa: There Is a Crisis in the Humanities,” Sapping Attention, July 27, 2018, https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2018/07/mea-culpa-there-is-crisis-in-humanities.html.

12 On communication and posthuman space and place, see Joan Faber McAlister, “Ten Propositions for Communication Scholars Studying Space and Place,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 113–21. McAlister's essay is an introduction to a special issue worth reading in its entirety.

13 See Casey Boyle, Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018); Scot Barnet and Casey Boyle, eds., Rhetoric Through Everyday Things (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016); Damien Smith Pfister, “Against the Droid's ‘Instrument of Efficiency,’ for Animalizing Technologies in a Posthumanist Spirit,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 2 (2017): 201–27; Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of a General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. Kennedy argues that rhetoric, in its most general form, is energy.

14 A nod to both the album and its namesake song: Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders, “Break Up the Concrete,” in Break Up the Concrete (Santa Monica, CA: Shangri-La Music, 2008), CD. Hynde tells of writing this song after being on the road touring for some time seeing endless concrete, thinking, “Just break up the f-----g concrete!”

15 Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud, A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric (Baltimore, MD: Lexington, 2015).

16 World Future Fund, “Law of Mother Earth, The Rights of Our Planet: A Vision from Bolivia,” December 2010, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Projects/Indicators/motherearthbolivia.html.

17 Eleanor Ainge Roy, “New Zealand River Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Being,” The Guardian, March 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being.

18 See Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, “The History of Corporate Personhood,” Brennan Center for Justice, April 7, 2014, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/hobby-lobby-argument.

19 “About: The FSA-OWI,” Photogrammar, http://photogrammar.yale.edu/about/fsa_owi/.

20 G. Thomas Goodnight, “From Architectonics to Polytechtonics: Rhetoric, Communication, and Information,” Poroi 10, no. 1 (2014): 1–21, Article 4, doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1185.

21 Ibid., 3.

22 Ibid., 3–4.

23 Ibid., 16.

24 Ibid., 14–15.

25 Ibid., 16. For an extended analysis and critique of currently lived dystopian polytechntonic rhetoric, see Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

26 Scharp and Thomas cite key works here: Elizabeth A. Suter, “Introduction: Critical Approaches to Family Communication Research: Representation, Critique, and Praxis,” Journal of Family Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–8; Nicole Peimonte, “More to the Story: How the Medical Humanities Can Learn From and Enrich Health Communication Studies,” Review of Communication 17, no. 3 (2017): 137–48.

27 See Luka Arsenjuk and Michelle Koerner, “Study, Students, Universities: An Introduction,” Polygraph 21 (2009): 8.

28 See Mari Lee Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015), 82–85; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111.