Cameron Mozafari's guest appearances

Cameron Mozafari

re:verb

Steven Pinker

Ray Bradbury

Ryan Mitchell

Benjamin Dixon

Paul Elliott

Kendall Phillips

Frank Santoro

Richard Purcell

Liana Maneese

Barbara Johnstone

Dana Cloud

Stephanie R. Larson

Patricia Dunmire

Jenny Rice

Scott Riess

OwlTail

Ana Cooke

Asao B. Inoue

John Oddo

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter’s box and faced off against Calvin’s Curveball, a trivia question related to their research. We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb’s co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb. We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (@reverb_cast) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter’s box and faced off against Calvin’s Curveball, a trivia question related to their research. We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb’s co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb. We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/reverb_cast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@reverb_cas</a>t) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!

E53: Third Anniversary Celebration (w/ John Oddo, James J. Brown Jr., Derek Handley, Asao B. Inoue, Kendall Phillips, Cameron Mozafari, and Ana Cooke)

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 implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence." We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity &amp; "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism &amp; "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.Works referenced in this episodeBlaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer &amp; S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.Fauconnier, G., &amp; Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.Lakoff, G., &amp; Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.Perelman, C., &amp; Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson &amp; P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.Skinnell, R. &amp; Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch &amp; S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille &amp; S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.Thibodeau, P., &amp; Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.Links &amp; resources related to Albuquerque, NM protestsNews coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven BacaDonation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organizationNational list of local bail funds and other related resources

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 implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent <a href="https://github.com/cameron2786/trumpcovidcorpus" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project</a>, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence."</a> We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity &amp; "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism &amp; "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.Works referenced in this episodeBlaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer &amp; S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.Fauconnier, G., &amp; Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.Lakoff, G., &amp; Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.Perelman, C., &amp; Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson &amp; P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.Skinnell, R. &amp; Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch &amp; S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille &amp; S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.Thibodeau, P., &amp; Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.Links &amp; resources related to Albuquerque, NM protests<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/16/albuquerque-militia-shooting-protest/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">News coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven Baca</a><a href="http://www.ffol.org/donate.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Donation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organization</a><a href="https://linktr.ee/nationalresourceslist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">National list of local bail funds and other related resources</a>

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