This book explores the U.S. asylum process and how those seeking shelter deal with the rhetorical pressures of compelling asylum narratives they need to write in order to stay. Centered around a study conducted at a shelter on the U.S. border, this book moves beyond this context to demonstrate how liminal sites provide opportunities for displaced communities to employ distinct shared rhetorical practices of daily life—like silence and routine—that both safeguard vulnerabilities and enact agency for individuals within precarious spaces. Placing people who seek asylum and those who work with them as rhetorical and socio-cultural experts on this issue, the study adds to the emerging importance of rhetoric within discussions of asylum and forced migration and demonstrates the significance of rhetorical ecology theory as part of a blended methodology in understanding people seeking asylum as a group in a perpetual and explicit state of ethos development. Highlighting the need for support which is sensitive to the narrative struggles people seeking asylum face, this book will have important findings for scholars and upper-level students of cultural rhetorics, feminist rhetoric, migration studies, political science, and intercultural communication.

"This book explores the U.S. asylum process and how those seeking shelter deal with the rhetorical pressures of compelling asylum narratives they need to write in order to stay. Centred around a study conducted at a shelter on the US border, this book moves beyond this context to demonstrate how liminal sites provide opportunities for displaced communities to employ distinct shared rhetorical practices of daily life-like silence and routine-that both safeguard vulnerabilities and enact agency for individuals within precarious spaces. Placing people who seek asylum and those who work with them as rhetorical and socio-cultural experts on this issue, the study adds to the emerging importance of rhetoric within discussions of asylum and forced migration and demonstrates the significance of rhetorical ecology theory as part of a blended methodology in understanding people seeking asylum as a group in a perpetual and explicit state of ethos development. Highlighting the need for support which is sensitive to the narrative struggles people seeking asylum face, this book will have important findings for scholars and upper-level students of cultural rhetorics, feminist rhetoric, migration studies, political science, and intercultural communication"--

In the current geopolitical climate—in which unaccompanied children cross the border in record numbers, and debates on the topic swing violently from pole to pole—the subject of immigration demands innovative inquiry. In The Rhetorics of US Immigration, some of the most prominent and prolific scholars in immigration studies come together to discuss the many facets of immigration rhetoric in the United States. The Rhetorics of US Immigration provides readers with an integrated sense of the rhetorical multiplicity circulating among and about immigrants. Whereas extant literature on immigration rhetoric tends to focus on the media, this work extends the conversation to the immigrants themselves, among others. A collection whose own eclecticism highlights the complexity of the issue, The Rhetorics of US Immigration is not only a study in the language of immigration but also a frank discussion of who is doing the talking and what it means for the future. From questions of activism, authority, and citizenship to the influence of Hollywood, the LGBTQ community, and the church, The Rhetorics of US Immigration considers the myriad venues in which the American immigration question emerges—and the interpretive framework suited to account for it. Along with the editor, the contributors are Claudia Anguiano, Karma R. Chávez, Terence Check, Jay P. Childers, J. David Cisneros, Lisa M. Corrigan, D. Robert DeChaine, Anne Teresa Demo, Dina Gavrilos, Emily Ironside, Christine Jasken, Yazmin Lazcano-Pry, Michael Lechuga, and Alessandra B. Von Burg.

This book focuses on the diverse tapestry of families in contemporary U.S. culture. Each chapter explores a different kind of family and examines their specific communication behaviors. We live in times of increasing diversity that complicate our understandings of ourselves as well as others who may be quite different from us. These complexities also impact our definition of "family" in addition to our interpretation of family communication behaviors. This book provides an examination of family communication practices in families that are underrepresented in the research of the discipline, and underserved in U.S. culture: immigrant families; family members in interracial relationships; LGBTQ families; low-income Latinx families; families with an incarcerated parent; and families headed by grandparents. The book is an initial effort to expand the lens of family communication scholarship to focus on "families on the margins". Through a variety of, sometimes unique, methods including textual analysis, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art projects collected at a Pride festival, each chapter in this collection adds to our knowledge of how we define family and how families communicate in the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication.

This volume provides an authoritative, evenhanded overview of the Trump administration's family separation and child detention policies at the U.S.-Mexico border-and the impact of those policies and actions on children, their parents, border security, and U.S. politics. The 21st Century Turning Points series is a one-stop resource for understanding the people and events changing America today. Each volume provides readers with a clear, authoritative, and unbiased understanding of a single issue or event that is driving national debate about our nation's leaders, institutions, values, and priorities. This particular volume is devoted to the issue of child migrant detention on the U.S.-Mexico border. It provides background information on the political, social, and economic forces driving undocumented immigration into America; explains the policies and records of both the Obama and Trump administrations on immigration, deportation, and border security; summarizes current laws and regulations governing U.S. border and immigration policies; recounts President Trump's rhetoric and record on both legal and "illegal" immigration, including his promise to build a "Border Wall" with funds from Mexico; surveys living conditions in the border detention centers operated by U.S. authorities; and discusses the impact of detention and family separation on children taken into custody.

North American Regionalism problematizes “North America” as an important region in its own right, breaking with the area-studies convention that divides the Global North and Global South portions of the Western Hemisphere at the US-Mexican border. By cutting across this division, the theoretically sophisticated essays in this volume yield new insights about politics, society, and the economy of North America, opening dialogues with the New Regionalism approach and the literature on comparative regional studies. Drawing on a six-year interdisciplinary collaboration among leading scholars from Canadian, Mexican, US, and European universities, the book brings North America back into International Relations’ study of regions and regionalism. The book includes robust theoretical and empirical engagement with issues of trade, migration, security, energy and climate, and the rise of China.

Kuypers combines rhetorical theory and framing analysis in an examination of the interaction of the press and the president during international crisis situations in the post-Cold War world. Three crises are examined: Bosnia, Haiti, and the North Korean nuclear capability issue. Kuypers effectively demonstrates the changed nature of presidential crisis rhetoric since the end of the Cold War. Kuypers employs a new historical/critical approach to analyze both the press and the Clinton administration's handling of three international crisis situations. Using case studies of Bosnia, Haiti, and the alleged North Korean nuclear buildup in 1993, he examines contemporary presidential crisis communication and the agenda-setting and agenda-extension functions of the press. The importance of this study lies in its timeliness; President Clinton is the first atomic-age president not to have the Cold War meta-narrative to use in legitimating international crises. Prior studies in presidential crisis rhetoric found that the president received broad and consistent support during times of crisis. Kuypers found that the press often advanced an oppositional frame to that used by the Clinton administration. The press frames were found to limit the options of the President, even when the press supported a particular presidential strategy. This is a major study that will be of interest to scholars and researchers of the press, the modern presidency, and American foreign policy.

Like every discipline, Rhetorical Studies relies on a technical vocabulary to convey specialized concepts, but few disciplines rely so deeply on a set of terms developed so long ago. Pathos, kairos, doxa, topos—these and others originate from the so-called classical world, which has conferred on them excessive authority. Without jettisoning these rhetorical terms altogether, this handbook addresses critiques of their ongoing relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects. A New Handbook of Rhetoric inverts the terms of classical rhetoric by applying to them the alpha privative, a prefix that expresses absence. Adding the prefix α- to more than a dozen of the most important terms in the field, the contributors to this volume build a new vocabulary for rhetorical inquiry. Essays on apathy, akairos, adoxa, and atopos, among others, explore long-standing disciplinary habits, reveal the denials and privileges inherent in traditional rhetorical inquiry, and theorize new problems and methods. Using this vocabulary in an analysis of current politics, media, and technology, the essays illuminate aspects of contemporary culture that traditional rhetorical theory often overlooks. Innovative and groundbreaking, A New Handbook of Rhetoric at once draws on and unsettles ancient Greek rhetorical terms, opening new avenues for studying values, norms, and phenomena often stymied by the tradition. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Caddie Alford, Benjamin Firgens, Cory Geraths, Anthony J. Irizarry, Mari Lee Mifsud, John Muckelbauer, Bess R. H. Myers, Damien Smith Pfister, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Alessandra Von Burg.

Terrorism and Asylum, edited by James C. Simeon, explores terrorism and asylum in all its interrelated and variable aspects, and permutations. The critical role terrorism plays as a driver in forced displacement, within the context of protracted armed conflict and extreme political violence, is analyzed. Exclusion from refugee protection for the alleged commission of terrorist activities is thoroughly interrogated. Populist politicians’ blatant use of the “fear of terrorism” to further their public policy security agenda and to limit access to refugee protection is scrutinized. The principal issues and concerns regarding terrorism and asylum and how these might be addressed, in the public interest while, at the same time, protecting and advancing the human rights and dignity of everyone are offered. See inside the book.

In Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta explores the innovative strategies that South Asian feminist, queer, and labor organizations in the United States have developed to assert claims to rights for immigrants without the privileges or security of citizenship. Since the 1980s many South Asian immigrants have found the India-centered “model minority” politics of previous generations inadequate to the task of redressing problems such as violence against women, homophobia, racism, and poverty. Thus they have devised new models of immigrant advocacy, seeking rights that are mobile rather than rooted in national membership, and advancing their claims as migrants rather than as citizens-to-be. Creating social justice organizations, they have inventively constructed a transnational complex of rights by drawing on local, national, and international laws to seek entitlements for their constituencies. Das Gupta offers an ethnography of seven South Asian organizations in the northeastern United States, looking at their development and politics as well as the conflicts that have emerged within the groups over questions of sexual, class, and political identities. She examines the ways that women’s organizations have defined and responded to questions of domestic violence as they relate to women’s immigration status; she describes the construction of a transnational South Asian queer identity and culture by people often marginalized by both mainstream South Asian and queer communities in the United States; and she draws attention to the efforts of labor groups who have sought economic justice for taxi drivers and domestic workers by confronting local policies that exploit cheap immigrant labor. Responding to the shortcomings of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part, these groups challenge the assumption that citizenship is the necessary basis of rights claims.