Commonplace Witnessing examines how citizens, politicians, and civic institutions have adopted idioms of witnessing in recent decades to serve a variety of social, political, and moral ends. The book encourages us to continue expanding and diversifying our normative assumptions about which historical subjects bear witness and how they do so. Commonplace Witnessing presupposes that witnessing in modern public culture is a broad and inclusive rhetorical act; that many different types of historical subjects now think and speak of themselves as witnesses; and that the rhetoric of witnessing can be mundane, formulaic, or popular instead of rare and refined. This study builds upon previous literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and theological studies of its subject matter in order to analyze witnessing, instead, as a commonplace form of communication and as a prevalent mode of influence regarding the putative realities and lessons of historical injustice or tragedy. It thus weighs both the uses and disadvantages of witnessing as an ordinary feature of modern public life.

"Unchecked climate change affects nearly everything on Earth, including the way humans communicate. In A Sense of Urgency, Debra Hawhee focuses our attention on new communication strategies that are emerging around the global climate crisis. At the heart of the story Hawhee tells are the challenges that our ecological future poses to rhetoric, and how those challenges demand that we learn to privilege more than our pasts and ourselves. The challenges of imagining futures under dramatically different climate conditions, of communicating climate science, and of offsetting human privilege all expose the limits of rhetoric as conceived by ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. The most glaring limit is the prominence those thinkers granted to precedent. When it comes to the climate crisis, precedent is not up to the task of addressing the problem at hand. Climate activists, scientists, artists, and scholars are trying to overcome this limitation, and A Sense of Urgency examines four departures from rhetoric's playbook that can be helpful in this struggle. Each of these departures presents new resources and different means of intensification in response to situations with few to no precedents. For Hawhee, thinking with these departures, and the attendant rhetorical strategies, can help people fathom both what is happening and what will happen if action is not taken. In this way, A Sense of Urgency is an indispensable guide in our search for new imaginative pathways"--

In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Dismantling the primacy and notion of traditional human-based forms of witnessing, Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help us better understand contemporary crises. He examines the media-specificity of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land and autonomous drone warfare to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic investigative tools. Throughout, he illuminates the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability. By challenging readers to rethink their understanding of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in the context of interconnected crises, Richardson reveals the complex entanglements between witnessing and violence and the human and the nonhuman.

Museums and the Act of Witnessing examines how representations of traumatic histories and the legacies of the twentieth century in museums and heritage sites across the world shape political, social and cultural identities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of a variety of museum exhibitions around the globe, the book demonstrates how the narrative of ‘witnessing’ has shaped representation of war, genocide, repression and violence. Revealing that this form of presentation is inherently Western in its origins and nature, Wilson goes on to argue that witnessing the past is to colonise the future, as we project a certain view of the events of the past onto the present. Detailing the character, content and meanings of representation that focus on the traumatic events of the twentieth century, the book demonstrates the way in which visitors are cast as ‘witnesses’ and questions what the true purpose of witnessing really is. Museums and the Act of Witnessing draws attention to the fact that we have inherited a distinct, and often limited, mode of seeing the past and considers how we can more effectively engage with the past in the present. The book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, history, sociology, conflict, politics and memory.

From its quiet inception in 1988, to a hailstorm of statewide and national controversy over thirty years later, this book follows the development of public discourse regarding a clergy sexual abuse scandal in a small Catholic Diocese in Central Pennsylvania. Weaving together the evolving local and national narratives, it offers a striking account of how stakeholder rhetoric has influenced public perception of the Catholic abuse crisis in America, and driven public actions. While the book enriches our local knowledge of the tragic--and ongoing--cultural trauma triggered by the revelation of clergy perpetrated abuse in a small Catholic Diocese, it also makes a critical theoretical contribution to our understanding of the role of rhetoric in publicizing private pain, and galvanizing collectives to take it on as their own. The process of cultural trauma, Niebauer contends, unfolds through rhetorical forms that provide individuals with a constraining and enabling set of rhetorical choices. Highlighting the recurrent rhetorical forms of narration, kategoria, apologia, and topoi, The Diocese's Darkest Chapter brings a new vocabulary and explanatory force to the study of cultural trauma, and the Catholic abuse crisis in America.

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts promote insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Adhering to an instructive narrative, Affective Societies provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook at the end of each chapter. Presenting interdisciplinary research from scholars within the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies," this insightful monograph will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as affect and emotion, anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies.

This handbook presents cutting-edge and global insights on sustainable heritage, engaging with ideas such as data science in heritage, climate change and environmental challenges, indigenous heritage, contested heritage and resilience. It does so across a diverse range of global heritage sites. Organized into six themed parts, the handbook offers cross-disciplinary perspectives on the latest theory, research and practice. Thirty-five chapters offer insights from leading scholars and practitioners in the field as well as early career researchers. This book fills a lacuna in the literature by offering scientific approaches to sustainable heritage, as well as multicultural perspectives by exploring sustainable heritage in a range of different geographical contexts and scales. The themes covered revolve around heritage values and heritage risk; participatory approaches to heritage; dissonant heritage; socio-environmental challenges to heritage; sustainable heritage-led transformation and new cross-disciplinary methods for heritage research. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars in heritage studies, archaeology, museum studies, cultural studies, architecture, landscape, urban design, planning, geography and tourism.