This chapter surveys and critiques the three major viewpoints on the ethics of communication, which I label Civility, Victory, and Open-mindedness. For Civility, activism must be governed by a set of rules for respectful engagement. For Victory, the ends justify the means, and for the sake of one’s political goals, one may need to mislead audiences, dismiss opponents, and use ad hominem attacks. For Open-mindedness, it is violent and immoral to impose one’s views on others. I argue that all three perspectives have serious shortcomings, but that each voice expresses a valuable concern. People want their advocacy to be moral, effective, and nonviolent, but often feel like it is impossible to have all three.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which he discusses his division of rhetoric into deliberative, epideictic, and judicial or forensic rhetoric and a selection of speeches that illustrate each of these modes of rhetoric. There are two examples of deliberative rhetoric, eight of epideictic rhetoric, and seven of judicial rhetoric. The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the late twentieth century of our era.

Debate and deliberation are two commonly promoted strategies for democratic education. Both strategies are designed to unearth different points of view and then engage in reason-giving and argumentation; in other words, they help students to recognize pluralism. When done well, both also model inquiry and deepen understanding about the issues being investigated. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical justification for each and show how the adversarial aspect of debate engages a different set of democratic skills than the more collaborative approach of deliberation. These differences require teachers to make judgments about how best to use these strategies in the classroom. We conclude by addressing some critiques of these strategies and discuss how alternative discussion designs might overcome some of the limitations of deliberation and debate.

This chapter looks at how and why Churchill has become such a divisive figure. It opens with a description of recent debates in the public discourse and on social media. It then briefly discuses Churchill’s reputation during his lifetime before recounting the role that he played in shaping his own legacy through his words, written and spoken, and through the creation of his archive and official biography. The authors then examine the long and complex historiography of Churchill, highlighting some of the most significant challenges to the dominant Churchillian narrative. Particular attention is paid to the more recent politicising of Churchill as a result of debates over Brexit, empire and race.

In the early years of the 2010s, new television and radio stations in a postcolonial Islamic Republic of Mauritania struggled to fill airtime with something other than the nightly news, recorded music performances, and images of Mauritania’s countryside set to traditional music. Talk shows, commercials, and sketch comedies were some of the new productions broadcast on private television and radio programs. Short situational or sketch comedy television programs sometimes used l’ḥjāb as a narrative hook for an episode relying on specific gendered tropes and stereotypes about its experts to elicit laughs from viewers. This chapter examines such television programs as well as the ways Islamist preachers also began using social media to their advantage to reflect on contemporary social issues in this period to examine how a larger Mauritanian public understands, criticizes, makes use of, and ignores l’ḥjāb, its experts, and its detractors. While the representations of l’ḥjāb in the media in the late 2010s show Mauritanians challenging the legitimacy of its bases, its experts and its efficacy, these images nonetheless provide evidence of its persistent relevance to the challenges of daily life and its capacity to adapt and respond to questions of modernity.

“Liberators and Friends,” recounts the dramatic events of D-Day – the airborne transit from England to Normandy, the jump, and the shock of landing in a place that was not on the maps of the paratroopers. The flooded areas, the marais, further compounded the problems the paratroopers encountered. The commanding officer, Major Charles Johnston, overruled subordinates, like Captain David Brummitt, and decided to stay and defend Graignes. That the paratroopers found themselves able to wage their own private war can only be explained by the astonishing commitment of the people of Graignes. Led by Mayor Alphonse Voydie and café owner Germaine Boursier, the village organized itself to support and feed the paratroopers.

Discusses the different (philosphical and non-philosophical) ways in which the content, dynamic, and influence of the Davos debate has hitherto been interpreted. The common thread throughout these various interpretations is that no profound philosophical discussion took place between Cassirer and Heidegger. In contrast to this, I suggest that the Davos debate, as well as the larger 'Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute' centres on three key philosophical topics that stand in a coherent, hierarchic relation to each other.

Offers a thorough reading of all texts in which Cassirer and Heidegger explicitly engaged with each other’s thought. I first sketch the philosophical context of the Davos debate, which constitutes only one moment of a dispute that started in 1923 and continued until the publication of Cassirer’s The Myth of the State in 1946 (1.1). Second, I argue that the public debate in Davos hinges on three interrelated topics: the proper interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, the human condition, and the task of philosophy. Concretely, I show that Cassirer and Heidegger’s diverging readings of Kant are motivated by their different views on the human condition, and that these views are in turn motivated by different conceptions of the task of philosophy, which I consider to be the fundamental breaking point between these two thinkers (1.2). Third, I explain that the same issues of contention also structure, in the same order and with the same increasing intensity, the entire, 23-year-long Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute (1.3).

Norms in the Latin west, and the sources they drew upon, were surprisingly consistent: those in power were supposed to be just, pious, generous, humble and valiant; they were to protect the defenceless and heed advice from wise and prudent men; so said the Bible, the Church Fathers, authors of classical antiquity and a body of medieval writers. For real insight into medieval thinking about power, we should look at the debates around these norms and their interpretation, and who had the resources and capabilities to engage in these debates. Surplus resources and widening literacy helped new social groups to emerge, challenging traditional clerical elites and adapting, appropriating and ultimately transformed existing discourses. Social and linguistic diversification, shifts in how a realm was defined, and the emergence of new actors and audiences – all affected how power was conceived. This diversity led to a multiplicity of opinions on how shared norms were constructed and interpreted. An inherent flexibility and elusiveness, along with the vigorous and even violent debates they engendered, define the norms and values of power in the Latin west.

This chapter describes the institutionalized form of consensual decision-making that prevailed in the House of Commons from the advent of consistent record-keeping in the Tudor period to the first two years of the Long Parliament. It highlights the role of status interaction in maintaining the primacy of consensual decisions while also specifying under what conditions these same status interactions occasionally resulted in meaningfully majoritarian decisions. Despite the presence of regular procedures that enabled majoritarian decision-making, the members of the early Stuart House of Commons almost completely avoided making decisions that were meaningfully majoritarian prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War. The House instead forged consensus with recourse to debate, committees, and a variety of other procedural mechanisms. They did so because enumerated votes (divisions) and meaningfully majoritarian voice votes had damaging status implications for Parliament, the Commons, and its members.

The final chapter presents the conclusions of the book, looking specifically at how speaking publicly gives people authority, particularly when others listen to and support them. Then it discusses the challenges and opportunities of speaking about one's faith in contemporary, technologically mediated contexts. Finally, how diversity of belief is managed within religious communities is discussed, in relation to the data analysed in the previous chapters.

This chapter focuses on how authority is claimed by individuals in religious traditions and the role of sacred texts as the 'word of God' in both Christianity and Islam. How individuals take on that authority for themselves, using scared texts in their discourse is analysed, with a discussion of how people of different faiths discuss the differences in their sacred texts, and how they establish authority when cultural norms change.

This chapter begins with defining the key terms of religion and discourse, presenting how different approaches to language have influenced the understanding of religious experience and vice versa. A definition of discourse is provided whichfocuses on functions, embodied cognition, and emergence. Religion and spiritual experience have been described from a variety ofperspectives with attempts to understand language with various perspectives (functional, embodied cognition, and emergence) applied to religious language and talk about religious experience. Finally, the emergence and influence of mediatisation and secularisation are discussed in terms of their effects on religious believers.

This chapter focuses on giving theoretical and methodological frameworks for dealing with religious discourse. While religious discourse can be observed in a variety of places, given the focus of this research on language-in-use and the development of religious belief and practice in these contexts, public dialogues about religion, in both supportive and antagonistic settings, are used as the primary data in this study. The data represents the ways in which speakers, foregrounding their religious identity, speak about religious belief and practice together, with a focus on instances in which the speakers are addressing challenges to the beliefs posed by social changes, such as those about homosexuality. Data sources were identified as a part of an ongoing, ten-year longitudinal observation of religious users online following principles of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography and describing the changes in systems in interaction over time, following the principles of a Discourse-Dynamics Approach and discourse analysis using Positioning Theory.

This chapter focuses on how religion is reprented in contemporary life and how categories like 'Christian' and 'Muslim' are established both within one's own religious community and in contrast to people of different faiths. The role of religion in the wider world is then considered with a particualr focus on how religionsadapt to changing cultural norms.