Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education

Vivian, Bradford

doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911558

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

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“…Witnessing has become one of the primary political acts through which civil society actors attempt to intervene in present global injustices, as well as have become a defining mode of popular understanding of past brutalities (Bradford, 2014;Givoni, 2014;Kurasawa, 2009;Zelizer, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Journalism and Witnessing

Pantti

2019

The Handbook of Journalism Studies

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In this dynamic context, I attempt to trace how the concept of witnessing has been defined in journalism and interdisciplinary scholarship and how witnessing has contributed to our understanding of journalism and its role in interpellating audiences as witnesses of significant events. This chapter focuses on the key issues that have preoccupied the scholarship examining witnessing and mass media: the construction of authority, authenticity and moral responsibility in different forms of witnessing acts. What are journalists doing when they purport to bear witness? How does the idea of witnessing relate to journalism's practices and norms? What is the role of eyewitness accounts in journalism's claims to truth? How are new digital technologies shaping witnessing as a cultural practice and political act? These are the questions that I attempt to answer in this chapter. In the next section, I introduce witnessing as a communicative act and discuss the role of witnessing in public culture drawing on the foundational contributions to witnessing literature, before discussing "bearing witness" and "eyewitnessing" in journalism. Then I discuss audiences as secondhand witnesses to mediated witness accounts and consider the role of new communication technologies in shaping contemporary rituals and politics of witnessing. Witnessing as a communicative act Research on the public act of witnessing began to thrive in the 1980s (e.g., Felman & Laub, 1992; Wieviorka, 1998). Although witness testimonies did not form a new genre, they burgeoned after the Second World War, in response to the Holocaust and subsequent atrocities and humanitarian disasters worldwide. The cultural prevalence of and wide interest in life narratives, individual experiences and emotions are discussed in Wieviorka's book The Era of Witness (1998). She pays particular attention to Holocaust testimonies and their impact on the public knowledge of these events in subsequent decades. Wieviorka (2006, p. 389) identifies the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as the advent of the "era of [the] witness." As explained by Attorney General Gideon Hausner (as cited in Wieviorka, 2006, p. 390

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Journalism and Witnessing

Pantti

2019

The Handbook of Journalism Studies

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Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action

Bloomfield

2023

JLP

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Addressing climate change requires engaging with the fluid, dynamic, and amorphous narrative of humanature relationships. I view environmental rhetoric as practices of storytelling that structure reality, guide actions, and shape understanding of the environment. Through rhetorical criticism, I analyzed fragments of climate activist discourse related to the narratives’ temporal and spatial scopes. I argue that reimagining the scope of our climate narratives’ temporal (chronos-kairos) and spatial (chora-topos) dimensions are inventional opportunities to motivate climate action toward more sustainable futures.

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Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity

Gerdes¹

2018

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education

Cited by 6 publications

References 26 publications

Journalism and Witnessing

Journalism and Witnessing

Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action

Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity

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