This timely collection develops concepts and refines research methods to better understand contemporary strategies in political persuasion. The book introduces an innovative analytical framework to explore dramaturgical rhetoric, applicable across various public arenas ranging from policy-making to current affairs media and activism. It features a set of empirical case studies on political discourse from six European countries (Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal, Russia) and draws on epistemic governance and cultural membership categorisation analysis to develop a new research field of “political poetics”. The contributors to the volume deal with themes such as shifting evaluative scenes, interrelational identifications, temporal trajectories, and obliging moral address to provide new insights into moral casting. The book enhances critical literacy in political interaction and offers scholars and students alike with valuable new perspectives to grasp the relationship between rhetoric and democracy in the era of post-truth politics.
Part 1: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations.
Chapter 1:
Introduction - Epistemic governance meets membership categorization.
Chapter
2: Conceptualizing evaluative identifications in politics - The rhetorical
effects of organizing actors into morally persuasive interrelational scenes.-
Part 2: Policy-Making & Governance: Combating External Threats in National
Policy-Making.
Chapter 3: Intro: Scaffolding arguments for institutional
legitimacy and trust - Moral casting in justifications by governing
politicians.
Chapter 4: Regulating Moral Alibis to Safeguard Political
Responsibility: The Case of the Troikas Intervention in Portugal.
Chapter
5: History and continuity in political rhetoric: Articulating actor
categorisations in Russian Foreign Agent Legislation.- Part 3: News Media:
Addressing Us Through Attributing A Third In National News.
Chapter 6:
Intro: Staging public opinion formation and collective identifications -
Moral casting and societization in journalistic news texts.
Chapter 7:
Victim or traitor? Domesticating Alexei Navalny in Finnish, German and
Russian news reporting.
Chapter 8: The moral effects of framing Eurovision
news on Israel - Netta Barzilai, a good agent who brought victory to a
reprehensible country.- Part 4: Civic Activism- Mobilizing Action Online to
Change Gender Relations.
Chapter 9: Intro: Agitating political agency
through relational constellations - Moral casting and mobilization of
citizens in online videos.
Chapter 10: Are you furious because of African
cannibals infesting Europe? - A case of rhetorical failure in Hungarian
far-right activism.
Chapter 11: Validating testimonial knowledge - Category
work in activism against gender-based violence in melodramatic visual
production.- Part 5: Closing.
Chapter 12: Identifications, membership
categorization, and epistemic governance: an epilogue.
Hanna Rautajoki is University Lecturer and Head of Discipline in Sociology at Tampere University, Finland. Her research centers on strategic uses of identifications in social interaction, with extensive experience in interdisciplinary collaboration, covering institutional interaction, political rhetoric, affective communication, narrative research and membership categorization. Richard Fitzgerald is Professor of Communication at the University of Macau, China (SAR). He has researched and written extensively on methods of qualitative discourse analysis with particular focus on Membership Categorisation Analysis.
