A New Rhetoric of Social Movements

Analyzing the dynamic interplay between agitation and control, the work investigates how activists use visual, aural, verbal, and tech rhetoric to drive reform and revolution. It outlines a Hegemony-Formation-Pressure model through case studies that reveal media’s strategic influence on social movements.

A New Rhetoric of Social Movements explains the rhetoric—visual, aural, verbal, and technological—of social change actors from a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the interrelationship of agitation and control and the spectrum of movement activities from the reformist to the revolutionary. Readers learn not only how to describe social movements, but also how to explain them: why they succeed and by what means, why they fail and in what contexts and conditions, and in whose interests they operate. There is extensive consideration of how media, including social media, serve as affordances of social movement actors and organizations. Each chapter provides multiple current examples and features an extended case study for continuity and clarity. Chapters lay out a new theoretical framework for studying social movements: the Hegemony-Formation-Pressure model. In the context of counterhegemonic struggle, this model puts the moments of formation (identity- and consciousness-forming rhetorics) in a dialectical cycle with the tactics of pressure (instrumental action demanding institutional change). The idea of a circuit of formation and pressure captures the totality of movements and their complexity. Filling a gap in the literature, A New Rhetoric of Social Movements is an invaluable textbook for upper-division and graduate courses in communication studies, rhetoric, social movements, and U.S. history.