Description
Book SynopsisWater, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluence examines how individuals and communities have responded on a global scale to present day water crises as matters of social justice, through oratory, mass demonstration, deliberation, testimony, and other rhetorical appeals. This book applies critical communication methods and perspectives to interrogate the pressing yet mind-boggling dilemma currently faced in environmental studies and policy: that clean water, the very stuff of life, which flows freely from the tap in affluent areas, is also denied to huge populations, materially and fluidly exemplifying the currents of justice, liberty, and equity. Contributors highlight discourse and water justice movements in nonofficial spheres from activists, artists, and the grassroots. In extending the technical, economic, moral, and political conversations on water justice, this collection applies special focus on the novel rhetorical concepts and responses not necessarily unique to but especially enacted in water justice situations. Scholars of rhetoric, sociology, activism, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly useful.
Trade ReviewWater, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluence is a timely anthology that takes on an issue of great importance for the more-than-human world: water justice. The relationships between water, rhetoric, and social justice in the Anthropocene must be understood, analyzed, challenged, and reimagined if we are to have any chance of intervening on systems of colonialism, privatization, inequity, poverty, and racism that have shifted our understanding of water from universal right to an earned privilege. The chapters in this volume illuminate the many ongoing struggles over water injustices and highlight the important role that rhetoric has to play in promoting water justice. -- Danielle Endres, University of Utah
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Stirring the Waters: Justice, Injustice, and the Springs of Rhetorical Response
Chapter 1: Water is Life: Shared Destinies
Chapter 2: When Water is Energy: Tracing Mediatized Discourses in Chile’s Mega-Hydro Debate
Chapter 3: Culture-Jam or Log-Jam?: Rhetorics of Spectacle Protest in the Free the Snake Flotilla
Chapter 4: Reimagining Dam Removal to Resist Settler Colonial Logics,
Chapter 5: Water for the “Community” Good: Contested Meanings of Stakeholder Interests in Great Lakes Water Diversion Controversies
Chapter 6: Kansas and the Ogallala Aquifer: Greenwashing Attempts to Balance Water Conservation with Free Market Principles
Chapter 7: Naturalizing Environmental Injustice: How Privileged Residents Make Sense of Detroit’s Water Shutoffs
Chapter 8: Reviving Sister Water: Hydro-Anthropomorphism, Catholic Social Justice, and Pope Francis’ Eco-Rhetoric for the Care of Creation
Chapter 9: Copious Dwelling in a Sinking Landscape
Chapter 10: It’s All Child’s Play: Flint’s Water Crisis, Environmental Justice, and Little Miss Flint’s Ephebic Rhetorics
Chapter 11: Environmental Crises and Hydrosocial Networks: Using Online Discontent to Promote Water Justice in Shanghai
Chapter 12: Sun, Sand, and Satire: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Great Barrier Reef’s Obituary,
Chapter 13: Grievable Water: Mourning the Animas River
Chapter 14: Singing Across the Sea: The Challenge of Communicating Marine Noise Pollution
Chapter 15: The Human Rights of a River: Codifying the Posthuman
Chapter 16: Preventing Another Great Garbage Patch: Attuning to an Ecospheric Rhetoric
