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Political-Speech
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Abstract
If you're sitting here at town hall tonight, it means you want answers. You're here on your own time because you care about this town-and you want to make sure I care about it as much as you do. You want to make sure I'll bring real solutions with me to office, not just bandages. Well, I'm not going to waste any of your time. My main focus today is your children.
Related papers
This Meeting at This Tree: Reimagining the Town Hall Session
Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 2019
Co-authored with Stephanie P. Jones, Laura Jimenez, Grace Player, Joseph C. Rumenapp, and Joaquin Munoz Much of the language at academic conferences is purely metaphorical, so it is important to understand the cultural–historical significance of the metaphors used in constructing organizational gatherings, especially the metaphor invoked by the town hall meeting. Town halls/meetings were spaces where members gathered for democratic rule in a particular geopolitical space that was stolen, settled, and colonized. They often excluded women, indigenous people, and people of color. In using this name, then, Literacy Research Association (LRA) engages in settler colonialism in as far as it is considered townish and aspires to recreate the metaphorical essence of town meetings. However, the historic interconnectedness of LRA, the town hall, and settler colonialism can be upended. In fact, LRA can reimagine the entire concept of the town hall and create new metaphors upon which to base the gatherings. This article departs from the idea of the town hall, and it also departs from the traditional structure of academic papers. Specifically, this article highlights position statements written by five scholars who embody numerous social and individual identities. In each statement, the scholars discuss their ideas for the future of LRA—their concerns and their hopes. Additionally, the article includes symbolic sketches of LRA members to represent the people who are often muted within the organization. Essentially, we, the authors, begin an imagining process as we speculate on what LRA meetings can look like when marginalized voices speak out not only about their questions and concerns but also about their solutions.
American town halls: Public sphere to public screen
The raucous turn in American town hall meetings has captivated the public and startled politicians. Politicians have increasingly turned to digital modes of engagement and more intimate, controlled physical venues. Constituents view this techno-spacial shift as a form of withdrawal from public accountability. We explore the intersection of public argument, public space, technological influence, and democratic accountability by examining town halls as exemplars of a shift from a traditional public sphere to a 'public screen.'
Town Meeting as a Communication Event: Democracy’s Act Sequence
Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999-2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and evaluate conduct. I outline norms for deliberative democracy in a particular instantiation of democracy and show how local democracy draws from, and contributes to, the larger rhetorical-political culture in the United States. This essay contributes to studies of language and social interaction in political settings and addresses 1) the lack of communication scholarship concerning a fundamental part of New England local democracy, and 2) deliberative democratic theorists’ idealist notions of local democracy. Given the variety in forms of local political systems, opportunities abound for similar studies of other local democracies’ ways of speaking.
“I'm Just Raising the Question”: Terms for Talk and Practical Metadiscursive Argument in Public Meetings
2010
This study examines the meanings and functions of raising questions in utterances such as ‘‘I’m just raising the question.’’ We examine such phrases as they were used in deliberative public meetings about a water conservation initiative. We show how raising questions is a distinctive mode of talk that draws attention to an issue requiring further discussion. The family of terms, each of which includes some form of the words raise and question, are used as a practical metadiscourse in these meetings. We show how situated use of the terms reveals a distinctive sociality and rhetoric for participants in the meetings.
What's in a Political Slogan?
Philology (38), 2020
Despite their efficiency and their practically mandatory use in political campaigns, slogans are a largely under-researched area of political discourse. This paper focuses on political slogans and investigates them from a cognitive perspective. It aims to provide a description of the conceptual structure underlying political slogans, which could also serve as a stepping stone for further investigations of their 'witty', 'catchy', and 'quotable' character. The paper demonstrates that the conceptual elements in the scenario prototypically employed in political slogans are the ones of leader, people being led, a social issue/ a solution to a social issue/ a goal, time, and space. The analysis demonstrates how these scenario elements function prototypically. This hypothesized conceptual structure is tested against a dataset specifically compiled for the present purposes. The dataset includes 25 slogans used within UK and USA political contexts over the last 70 years. The analysis conducted is qualitative.
Politicians “Stay Home”
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2021
This paper analyses the intimate space of politicians at home during lockdown through their personal Instagram accounts, using both live stories (which I have been saving daily), the pictures and videos they post and the accompanying text. In order to do so, it will focus on two young female politicians who have become iconic for left-wing movements around the world. They are Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona (Spain), and Alessandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative for New York’s 14th congressional district (USA). As previous political outsiders who are deeply involved in activism and belong to what some will call a left-wing populist wave, AOC and Colau interact with their followers in “an authentic way”, often posting very intimate and apparently uncurated images of their daily life. The goal of the paper is to examine how they construct authenticity and connect with their constituencies during the COVID-19 lockdown through a qualitative visual rhetorical analysis.
Being political now
Gri ith Review Edition, 2006
n the beginning was the '60s. Or so we're told -the culture wars can be traced back to the second wave of feminism, the pill, traditions fractured, authority called into question. A lot of symbolic weight for a decade to bear, and its images are burned into our collective imagination. At the Museum of Brisbane, they jump off the walls -photos of long-haired protesters in bellbottoms confronting Special Branch detectives in brown suits and unruly sideburns; posters, badges, banners, summonses. The Taking to the Streets exhibition (on display until September 24, 2006) revives memories of the causes and experience that symbolise a generation.
Listening to citizens
MaRBLe
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.55 6.2 Description of the sample………………………………………………………….p.56 6.3 Actual interaction between citizens and local politicians………… p.57 6.4 Expectations concerning the interaction between citizens and local politicians ………………………………………………………………………….p.61 6.5 Expectations and actual interaction…………………………………………. p.71 6.6 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………..p.71 Chapter 7 _ Übach-Palenberg: empirical findings 7.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.73 7.2 Description of the sample………………………………………………………….p.74 7.3 Actual interaction between citizens and local politicians………… p.75 7.4 Expectations concerning the interaction between citizens and local politicians…………………………………………………………………………. p.80 7.5 The literature on local politics……………………………………………………p.90 7.6 Conclusion and recommendations…………………………………………….p.91 Chapter 8 _ Valkenburg: empirical findings 8.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. p.95 8.2 The Case Study of Valkenburg aan de Geul-a Dutch Municipality………………………………………………………………………………..p.95 8.3 Description of the Sample………………………………………………………… p.97 8.4 Actual Interaction between Citizens and Local Politicians………. p.98 8.5 Expectations concerning interaction between citizens and local politicians………………………………………………………………………… p.101 8.6 Expectations and Actual Interaction………………………………………. p.109 8.7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. p.111 Chapter 9 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………. p.113 References………………………………………………………………………………………………p.119 Annex 1.…….……………………………………………………………………………………………p.125 This booklet is devoted to the relationship between citizens and local councillors in four municipalities in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. Eight Bachelor students of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University conducted the research, in collaboration with Professor of Local and Regional Governance Klaartje Peters. We are grateful for the help of all participating citizens in the four municipalities and we are thankful for the hospitality of the municipalities. We also would like to thank the mayors and all other local politicians, and City Inspector Thomas de Jong who invited us to present the results of our research on June 27, 2016, in Übach-Palenberg. Finally, we want to thank the institutions that made this project possible, not the least the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, Sabine Kuipers for her help with the editing and Dr. Pieter Caljé, who deserves our gratitude for organizing and coordinating MaRBLe projects at our faculty, and offering Bachelor students a chance to learn how to do research.
Sample
Political Speech
If you’re sitting here at town hall tonight, it means you want answers. You’re here on your own time because you care about this town—and you want to make sure I care about it as much as you do. You want to make sure I’ll bring real solutions with me to office, not just bandages. Well, I’m not going to waste any of your time. My main focus today is your children.
“Children are our future.” It’s a phrase we hear often, but it is often used without a full understanding of the implications. “Children are our future” means that children are our priority. Right now, we have some of the lowest test scores in the entire county. Not only that, our math and science scores were around 20 points lower than the state average. That is not making children our priority. That is not securing their future or the future of this town. No one wants to move to a town or stay in a town that has, to be frank, a lousy public education system.
When I was a child here, our town was actually renowned for its stellar schools, so what changed over the last thirty years? For one thing, an exorbitantly high percentage of the town’s budget has been allocated to parks, recreation, and beautification. Not to say that money was wasted—we have an extraordinarily gorgeous town—but pristine streets won’t help our students compete at a national level when it comes time to picking a college.
On top of that, we have a staff that is rife with teachers who have been offered tenure despite a long track record of under-performing students. During my time as superintendent of schools 10 years ago, I tried to push for a merit-based tenureship. It didn’t go through, and I’ve been pushing ever since. I think the most valuable change we can make as a town is ensuring that our teaching staff is filled with individuals who strive for perfection rather than settling for what’s merely acceptable. And what better way to motivate our schools than to give them a more appropriate budget? More money invested in our schools means a lower student-to-teacher ratio, which means student will be getting the attention they need and will have a better chance of fulfilling their true potential.
The Office of the Mayor should be held by an individual who can actually bring solutions that will change the town for the better. This town needs a drastic new approach before it’s too late. If we do things the way that they’ve always been done, then things will remain the way that they’ve always been. And that, at this point, means a continued decline in the quality of public education. Not meeting state standards is gross negligence and completely unacceptable. Don’t let it get any worse. I will not let this town go another year at the bottom of the totem pole.
If you will elect me as your public servant, will serve this town and the needs of its people. Those needs will change over time, but right now, as of today, the top priority is education, knowledge—the most precious and valuable resource a person can have. Vote Mahoney this Tuesday, and you’ll be voting a promising new future for this town and its youngest residents.