The Genocide Convention was drafted by the United Nations in the late 1940s, as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. But was the Genocide Convention truly effective at achieving its humanitarian aims, or did it merely exacerbate the divisive rhetoric of Cold War geopolitics? A Rhetorical Crime shows how genocide morphed from a legal concept into a political discourse used in propaganda battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the Cold War era, nearly eighty countries were accused of genocide, and yet there were few real-time interventions to stop the atrocities committed by genocidal regimes like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Renowned genocide scholar Anton Weiss-Wendt employs a unique comparative approach, analyzing the statements of Soviet and American politicians, historians, and legal scholars in order to deduce why their moral posturing far exceeded their humanitarian action.

This book explores the discourse and rhetoric that resists and opposes postsecondary prison education. Positioning prison college programs as the best method to truly reduce recidivism, the book shows how the public – and by extension politicians – remain largely opposed to public funding for these programs, and how prisoners face internal resistance from their fellow inmates when pursuing higher education. Utilizing methods including critical rhetorical history, media analysis, and autoethnography, the author explores and critiques the discourses which inhibit prison education. Cultural discourses, echoed through media portrayal of prisoners, produce criminals as both subhuman and always-already a threat to the public. This book highlights the history of rhetorical opposition to prison education; closely analyzes how convictism, prejudicial and discriminatory bias against prisoners, blocks education access and feeds the prison-industrial-complex an ever-recycled supply of free prison labor; and discusses the implications of prison education for understanding and contesting cultural discourses of criminality. This book will be an important reference for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in the fields of Rhetoric, Criminal justice, and Sociology, as well as Media and Communication studies more generally, Politics, and Education studies.

The Genocide Convention was drafted by the United Nations in the late 1940s, as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. But was the Genocide Convention truly effective at achieving its humanitarian aims, or did it merely exacerbate the divisive rhetoric of Cold War geopolitics? A Rhetorical Crime shows how genocide morphed from a legal concept into a political discourse used in propaganda battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the Cold War era, nearly eighty countries were accused of genocide, and yet there were few real-time interventions to stop the atrocities committed by genocidal regimes like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Renowned genocide scholar Anton Weiss-Wendt employs a unique comparative approach, analyzing the statements of Soviet and American politicians, historians, and legal scholars in order to deduce why their moral posturing far exceeded their humanitarian action.

Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. At the center of this era—when politicians sought to prove their “tough-on-crime” credentials—was the mark of criminality, a set of discourses that labeled members of predominantly poor, urban, and minority communities as threats to the social order. Through their use of the mark of criminality, public figures implemented extremely harsh penal polices that have helped make the United States the world’s leading jailer of its adult population. At the same time when politicians like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton and television shows such as COPS and America’s Most Wanted perpetuated images of gang and drug-filled ghettos, gangsta rap burst out of the hip-hop nation, emanating mainly from the predominantly black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Groups like NWA and solo artists (including Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur) became millionaires by marketing the very discourses political and cultural leaders used to justify their war on crime. For these artists, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. Furthermore, by underscoring the nimble rhetorical character of criminality, we can learn lessons that may inform efforts to challenge our nation’s failed policies of mass incarceration.

This book demands that we question what we are told about security, using tools we have had for thousands of years. The work considers the history of security rhetoric in a number of distinct but related contexts, including the United States’ security strategy, the "war" on Big Tech, and current concerns such as cybersecurity. Focusing on the language of security discourse, it draws common threads from the ancient world to the present day and the near future. The book grounds recent comparisons of Donald Trump to the Emperor Nero in a linguistic evidence base. It examines the potential impact on society of policy-makers’ emphasis on the novelty of cybercrime, their likening of the internet to the Wild West, and their claims that criminals have "gone dark". It questions governments’ descriptions of technology companies in words normally reserved for terrorists, and asks who might benefit. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book builds on existing literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences, most notably studies on rhetoric in Greco-Roman texts, and on the articulation of security concerns in law, international relations, and public policy contexts. It adds value to this body of research by offering new points of comparison, and a fresh but tried and tested way of looking at problems that are often presented as unprecedented. It will be essential to legal and policy practitioners, students of Law, Politics, Media, and Classics, and all those interested in employing critical thinking.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than one million copies sold! A “brilliant” (Lupita Nyong’o, Time), “poignant” (Entertainment Weekly), “soul-nourishing” (USA Today) memoir about coming of age during the twilight of apartheid “Noah’s childhood stories are told with all the hilarity and intellect that characterizes his comedy, while illuminating a dark and brutal period in South Africa’s history that must never be forgotten.”—Esquire Winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor and an NAACP Image Award • Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Time, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Esquire, Newsday, and Booklist Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.

DEBATING CRIME focuses on important controversies in the U.S. criminal justice system. It includes a variety of readings devoted to such hot topics as gun control, the death penalty, race and gender issues, prison privatization, and the war on drugs. Most issues are framed in an "opposing viewpoint" format, encouraging students to think more critically about these controversies.

This textbook guides students through rhetorical and assignment analysis, the writing process, researching, citing, rhetorical modes, and critical reading. Using accessible but rigorous readings by professionals throughout the college composition field, the Oregon Writes Writing Textbook aligns directly to the statewide writing outcomes for English Composition courses in Oregon. Created through a grant from Open Oregon in 2015-16, this book collects previously published articles, essays, and chapters released under Creative Commons licenses into one free textbook available for online access or print-on-demand.

Students of language, politics, religion, and philosophy have always turned to Aristotle, attributed with one of the greatest intellectual minds that ever lived, for answers and the dissection of seemingly natural phenomena. Aristotle and his contemporaries considered rhetorical skills-the ability to give speeches and make persuasive arguments-one of the most important a scholar could possess. In his famous essay Rhetoric, Aristotle outlines the three basic elements of the rhetorical arts: logos, pathos, and ethos; or logic, emotion, and ethics (truth). This pyramid makes up the tenets of rhetoric which are still taught today, along with Aristotle's examinations on how to interpret and compose effective speeches and presentations. Aristotle (384 Bi322 Be was a member of the triad of great Greek philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle is considered the authority originator of many philosophical ideas and teachings. Famous today for works such as Politics, Poetics, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics, his many writings cover a wide range of subjects, ranging from literature, art, music, and politics to physics, zoology, biology, and the scientific method.

Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines - mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science and history. Drawing from recent literary theory, it suggests the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry and explores communications beyond the academy, particulary in women's issues, religion and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.