Gestures of Concern

Chris Ingraham is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Utah and coeditor of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media.

“Chris Ingraham is a lively and engaging writer. While crafting beautiful prose he exhibits remarkable patience with trivial-often ephemeral-objects. Thus, he gives us ample opportunity to appreciate their public relevance and the role they play in helping to constitute public life in the internet age. And all of this he draws under the aegis of ‘gestures of concern’-a gem of a concept that makes a significant contribution to rhetoric, political theory, and public sphere theory.” - Ted Striphas, author of (The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control) “Laying out precisely why gestures of concern are significant and reminding us that there are never any empty gestures, Chris Ingraham offers a timely response to a certain reductive political discourse that sees meaning only in terms of representation. This book is a real pleasure to read.” - Jenny Rice, author of (Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis) “Ingraham’s wide-ranging engagement with rhetoric, artistic production, political engagement, and participatory culture makes his book of interest to those readers attracted to an interdisciplinary approach to cultural studies.” - Nicole Dib (Lateral) “[The] unfinished, uncertain, future-oriented dimension of the gesture is one of the key ideas in [Gestures of Concern], and it will help scholars in a number of fields push beyond critical practices that are too certain of themselves.” - Jim Brown (Rhetoric Society Quarterly) “Ingraham’s book is a timely investigation. In a period in which we are inundated by information and noise, he hopes to turn our attention to the quieter participatory acts ordinary people perform.... This work is an insightful look at the power of our concern.” - Ashleigh Angus (Continuum)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. The Shape We're In  11. Idiot Winds  232. Stickiness  513. Democratizing Creativity, Curating Culture  784. Citizen Artists, Citizen Critics  1085. Uncommonwealth  1336. Affective Commonwealths  161Epilogue. The Poet and the Anthropocene  187Notes  197Bibliography  225Index