Robert Asen – författare

Rhetorical critics have long had a troubled relationship with method, viewing it as at times opening up provocative avenues of inquiry, and at other times as closing off paths toward meaningful engagement with texts. Text + Field shifts scholarly attention from this conflicted history, looking instead to the growing number of scholars who are supplementing text-based scholarship by venturing out into the field, where rhetoric is produced, enacted, and consumed. These field-based practices involve observation, ethnographic interviews, and performance. They are not intended to displace text-based approaches; rather, they expand the idea of method by helping rhetorical scholars arrive at new and complementary answers to long-standing disciplinary questions about text, context, audience, judgment, and ethics. The first volume in rhetoric and communication to directly address the relevance, processes, and implications of using field methods to augment traditional scholarship, Text + Field provides a framework for adapting these new tools to traditional rhetorical inquiry.Aside from the editors, the contributors are Roberta Chevrette, Kathleen M. de Onís, Danielle Endres, Joshua P. Ewalt, Alina Haliliuc, Aaron Hess, Jamie Landau, Michael Middleton, Tiara R. Na’puti, Jessy J. Ohl, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Damien Smith Pfister, Samantha Senda-Cook, Lisa Silvestri, and Valerie Thatcher.

Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K–12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that market-based education reform inflicts on society runs much deeper. At their core, these efforts are antidemocratic.Arguing that democratic communities and public education need one another, Asen examines the theory driving privatization, popularized in the neoliberalism of Milton and Rose Friedman, as well as the case for school choice promoted by former secretary of education Betsy DeVos and the controversial voucher program of former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. What Asen finds is that a market-based approach holds not just a different view of distributing education but a different vision of society. When the values of the market—choice, competition, and self-interest—shape national education, that policy produces individuals, Asen contends, with no connections to community and no obligations to one another. The result is a society at odds with democracy.Probing and thought-provoking, School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy features interviews with local, on-the-ground advocates for public education and offers a countering vision of democratic education—one oriented toward civic relationships, community, and equality. This book is essential reading for policymakers, advocates of public education, citizens, and researchers.

Explores antagonistic encounters between people, both individuals and groups, and governments.In the form of demonstrations, social movements, guerrilla warfare, and internet "hacktivism," political dissidents or "counterpublics" challenge the state and assert themselves upon the public stage. At stake in such engagements are profound issues of political and economic redistribution, individual and collective rights, political legitimacy, social stability, and identity. This book explores encounters between marginalized people and states to better understand the contours of social controversy and social transformation borne from conflict.