Joshua Guitar – författare

Government whistleblowers contest authoritarian power. Yet, critical scholars have only minimally examined whistleblower discourses and hesitate to substantively interrogate the ideology of statism. In Dissent, Discourse, and Democracy: Whistleblowers as Sites of Political Contestation, the author addresses this exigency and critiques government whistleblowing discourses through an Anarchist lens, reifying a pattern of discursive statist behaviors. Upon exposing government malfeasance, whistleblowers and their corresponding symbolic designations endure an erasure of agency via abstraction. Joshua Guitar conceptualizes the totality of abstruction, identifying it both as a rhetorical manifestation of ideology and a method of critical rhetorical inquiry. The author reveals how whistleblowing, a quintessential tool of dissent within democracy, has been systematically constrained within the public forum and weaponized for statist interests. Scholars of political communication and rhetoric will find this book particularly interesting.

Through substantive case studies on issues of human rights, this collection of rhetorical investigations engages the interactions among whistleblowers, public protest, and relationships of power.While whistleblowers are commonly viewed as disempowered members of institutions who expose acts of wrongdoing, From a Whisper to a Movement argues that whistleblowing acts can occur from an assemblage of persons and places not typically associated with the term. This theoretical foundation affords us the ability to substantively interrogate the rhetorical linkage between solitary whistleblowing acts, scaffolded around a sense of democratic ethics, and the rhetoric of the consequent publics that demand corrective action. As mass social protests often emerge from singular moments of discovery, the connected discourses expose a unique site within the public forum rich with rhetorical significance. While not all whistleblowing utterances prompt public protests, and only some protests coalesce around the disclosure of wrongdoing, recent history demonstrates that exposed abuses of power often prompt collective action in the name of human rights. This volume interrogates how disempowered actors, often working alone, can inform democratic discourse and global movements.