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PODCAST

re:verb

Calvin Pollak and Alex Helberg

re:verb is a podcast about politics, culture, and language in action, featuring interviews and segments from scholars, writers, critics, and activists in the humanities, social sciences, and outside the academy.

news & politics philosophy

All Episodes

01:11:16

E44: The Political Aesthetics of Cold War Propaganda...

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2020/09/28

On today’s show, Alex and Ben speak with Dr. Bret Vukoder about his recently defended dissertation, an investigation into the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) filmic and televisual propaganda output during the Cold War. Due to a domestic production ban, the massive archive of over 20,000 films has been relatively unknown in media scholarship, until now.To investigate this rich but little known archive, we begin our conversation discussing a sub-genre of USIA propaganda, which Bret refers to

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00:55:51

E43: Comics literacy as musicianship: A conversation...

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2020/09/10

On today’s episode, Sophie speaks with author and artist Frank Santoro about his recently published graphic memoir, Pittsburgh. Santoro gives us a tour of how growing up in the city of Pittsburgh and experiencing its art scene from a young age influenced his unique comic style, as well as how he interprets the ascendency of comics as a form of mass pop culture. As an arts educator, he also offers his thoughts on visual literacy, the relationship between word and image in graphic works, and what we

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01:14:54

E42: Keep TikToking in "the free world"

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2020/08/25

This week’s episode of re:verb is presented as part of The 2020 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival, a weeklong podcast series centered on a common theme: “the digital future of rhetoric and composition.” Other featured podcasts include the Global Rhetorics Podcast, Kairoticast, Rhetorically Yours, Rhetoricity, RhetoricLee Speaking, Writing Remix Podcast, and The Big Rhetorical Podcast itself. We encourage everyone to check out these other fantastic shows and their contributions to the Carnival.In this

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01:24:18

E41: ALL of our languages are elegant! (w/ Dr. Asao...

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2020/08/17

On June 19, Rutgers University's English Department announced a slew of actions it would be taking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, including incorporating critical grammar into its pedagogy. As department chair Rebecca L. Walkowitz explained, this new approach seeks to foster "a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to [students] w/ regard to micro-level [grammatical] issues." In response, the conservative Twittersphere swiftly attempted to CANCEL Rutgers

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1:06:16

E40: Presidential rhetoric, unmasked (w/ Dr. Cameron...

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2020/07/27

The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and federal enforcement actions authorized by the president. So, how is the current administration's rhetoric

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00:23:29

E39: re:read - Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the...

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2020/06/26

Today marks the inauguration of a new style of episode we’re trying out called re:read, in which we bring you sonic re-imaginings of literary works, featuring dramatic vocal performances, sound effects, and music. Each of the works we re:read will include themes related to current political and cultural events, and will be bookended by brief reflections on its implications for contemporary audiences.For our first re:read, we bring to life a timely tale from horror master Edgar Allan Poe: “The Masque

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00:40:46

E38: State power and abolition

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2020/06/15

Current protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd represent a reckoning with the US’s long history of racism, settler colonialism, and oppression as codified in institutions of policing and governance.In today’s episode, Calvin and Ben explore this fraught history as a way of contextualizing recent protests against anti-Black police violence in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We begin by referencing academic conversations about the meaning of state power, as well as some useful genealogies of

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00:53:53

E37: Risk Assessment and the Rhetoric of Epidemics...

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2020/05/22

On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan’s dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push back against totalizing, dehumanizing discourses of HIV/AIDS prevention. According to Ryan's analysis of

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01:19:41

E36: re:joinder - Give me liberty AND give me death!

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2020/04/30

In this timely re:joinder episode, Sophie, Calvin, and Alex gather over Zoom to engage with some truly vile COVID-19 takes -- so you don't have to!Calvin shares "The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump's Use of 'Chinese Virus'", written by a guy named John at the conservative Federalist magazine, which apologizes for President Trump's strategic framing of the virus as inherently Chinese. In denying and obfuscating Trump's racist language, John makes some mind-bogglingly context-stripped and

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00:55:46

E35: Epicrisis for an epic crisis (w/ James J. Brown,...

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2020/04/16

With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our guest this week, James J. Brown, Jr. (@jamesjbrownjr), Associate Professor of English and Director of

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00:54:39

E34: What does it mean to be mobile? Space, Place,...

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2020/04/03

The spread of COVID-19 has changed the way we see our own relationship to space and mobility. Within this state of emergency, disparities in access are made more stark: as certain sectors of workers are able to continue their jobs under quarantine and observing social distancing guidelines while other sectors are forced into dangerous forms of mobility, borders old and new are being inscribed and reinscribed through austerity measures. The present crisis has exposed not only the existence but the

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00:46:01

E33: How can art help us reveal hidden histories and...

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2020/03/02

For the inaugural episode in our new series on Space, Place, and Mobility, re:verb co-producer Sophie Wodzak sits down with Alisha B. Wormsley, a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work bridges public art, social engagement, science fiction, and political activism to reveal forgotten histories and imagine alternative futures. Through innovative public works like the There Are Black People in the Future billboard (which we discussed back in Episode 6), The

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00:31:18

E32: Organizing Against Bloomberg (w/ Benjamin Dixon)

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2020/02/19

Recently, millions of potential US voters heard newly-unearthed comments made in 2015 by Michael Bloomberg -- the billionaire, former New York City Mayor, and current Democratic presidential primary candidate. In his remarks, Bloomberg vociferously defended stop-and-frisk, an NYPD policy directive that disproportionately targeted poor people and minorities for warrantless searches. The controversy over Bloomberg’s remarks raise questions about how the former Republican has risen to near the top of

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00:58:35

E31: re:joinder - No War with Iran!

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2020/02/03

In this re:joinder episode, Calvin presents Alex and Sophie with a set of op-eds -- all published in ostensibly liberal magazines -- that retroactively justify President Trump’s Jan. 3, 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, major general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. In our analysis, we expose the presuppositions latent in these articles’ narratives of post-9/11 US foreign policy, filling in some missing context about US ground and proxy wars in the Middle East since the second-half of

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00:34:46

E30: re:blurb - Irony

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2019/12/12

In this re:blurb episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to discuss the many kinds of Irony, and the unique ways in which this form of humor manifests itself on our favorite website, twitter dot com.First, we review the three main kinds of irony most often taught in schools--verbal, situational, and dramatic--all of which ask us to hold understandings of multiple, sometimes contradictory “realities” against one another. While the irony we

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01:12:31

E29: The Rhetoric of Horror Cinema w/ Kendall Phillips

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2019/10/29

Today we have the distinct privilege of discussing horror cinema, culture, and politics with Kendall Phillips, professor in the department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Kendall’s work focuses on the ways popular culture intersects with discursive and affective tensions within society, with a focus on public memory, controversy, and popular cinema. Among his other work, Kendall is the author of three books on the rhetoric of horror films, the most recent of which is

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00:59:37

E28: What's funny (and what's not) about place and...

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2019/10/17

This week, we’re keeping the laughs going with the second installment in our Rhetorics of Comedy series! In this episode, Calvin speaks with two comedians he met doing stand-up in Beijing, who are now performing comedy in other international locales: Greg Hutt (in Sofia, Bulgaria) and Paul Creasy (in London, UK). In each of these conversations, Calvin and our guests discuss their experiences performing comedy for a diverse array of different audiences around the world, exploring how ideas about

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00:46:20

E27: How do comedians think about writing, editing,...

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2019/10/03

Who says rhetoric can’t make you laugh? And who says making people laugh isn’t rhetorical? Today’s show is the first in a series on Rhetorics of Comedy, in which we interrogate the connections between humor, discourse, and contemporary life.In Part 1, we bring you a discussion with three local standup comics working in Pittsburgh, PA: Jared Helfer, Tom Higgins, and Lorenzo DiSilvio. We explore the rhetorical dimensions of what they do, ranging from how they define funny (and not funny), their

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01:02:07

E26: re:joinder - Pro-Free College, Pro-Loan...

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2019/09/19

In this re:joinder episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to roast two op-eds that criticize proposed plans to lower the price of college tuition and eliminate student loan debt.In the first article, Who Will Take a Paycut for Free College, published in the august and impartial Wallstreet Journal, author Joseph Epstein argues that we while the promise of free college might sound appealing, when it comes to higher education, “you get what

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00:46:02

E25: Fascism & Demagoguery (w/ CV Vitolo-Haddad)

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2019/08/29

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin discuss demagoguery and far-right rhetoric with CV Vitolo-Haddad, a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Director of Debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, we discuss CV’s recent publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly - “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and “The West” - which focuses on the rhetoric of the far-right group known as the “Proud Boys.”This article explores how the Proud Boys are

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104 results

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