Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex problems related to climate change and social inequities. Communication shapes transdisciplinary collaboration in myriad ways, and interdisciplinary and rhetorical approaches to communication can help identify these influences as well as strategies to transform inequitable communication patterns. In this paper, we share results from an engaged and ethnographic research project focused on strategic communication in a large-scale transdisciplinary collaboration to develop environmental-DNA (eDNA) science for coastal resilience. In this context, definitions of eDNA, perspectives about communication, and constructions of audience and expertise shape the ways in which collaborators co-produce knowledge across disciplines and with diverse partners. Identifying relationships among strategic communication, knowledge co-production, and power enables the development of strategic collaborative practices, including asking questions as a means to identify and negotiate differences in definitions of eDNA and using participatory methods and anti-oppressive data management platforms for ethical praxis.
Following the July 22, 2011, Oslo bombing and shootings at the Utøya youth camp Norway became embroiled in a conflict over commemorative ethics. The memorial initially selected in an international contest, Memory Wound by Jonas Dahlgren, drew opposition from victims’ families and local residents for its severe impact on the natural landscape. Plans for installation were cancelled in 2017. This controversy, we submit, must be contextualized in relation to the Norwegian justice system’s handling of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator whose criminal proceedings were kept relatively secluded. We demonstrate how the design of Memory Wound and the suppression of Breivik’s publicity reflect a symbolic logic traceable to a national imaginary of Norwegian exceptionalism. By interpretively aligning the use of negative space in Memory Wound with the muting of Breivik as a media event, we investigate the prescriptive force of symbols to inculcate world views. Specifically, we attend to the foreclosure of “prosthetic memory,” which through media circulation allows people to engage with memory that is not primarily theirs. We acknowledge the possibility of empathy across difference that Landsberg ascribes to prosthetic memory; however, we insist that the circumstances under which solidarity might be rejected must be considered. With a dual case study, we offer a perspective on enduring assumptions about cultural identity and the rise of rightwing extremism in Northern Europe.
Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory, edited by Frans H. van Eemeren and BartGarssen, is a collection of 20 papers selected from contributions to the proceedings of the 8 th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam in 2014. This collection is filtered into six dimensions of argumentation theory: general perspectives; analysis of argumentation; evaluation of argumentation; argument schemes; contextual embedding of argumentation; and linguistic approaches to argumentation. These six themes chosen for the collection appear to be distilled from the 18 themes featured in the ISSA conference, although the absence of editorial commentary on this organizational scheme leaves such speculation up to the reader. The different parts follow a natural order, beginning with ways to approach the process of argument theory as a whole, continuing with ways to work through the actual argument construction and ending with ways to put these theories into verbal practice.The first section explores general perspectives on argumentation theory. Here, we find four chapters, each of which offer approachable pathways scholars can use as entry-points by which to evaluate argument. In "Bingo! Promising Developments in Argumentation Theory," editor, Frans H. van Eemeren, recommends integration of three critical approaches to argumentation theory, including the trend toward empiricalization, atten-
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