Foundational Speeches and National Identities in Argentina and South Africa (2014-2017)
Co-lead investigators: Professor A M Vitale ( UBA, Argentina) and Distinguished Professor Ph-J Salazar (UCT, South Africa)
Summary:
This bilateral project is a comparative enquiry in the main foundational speeches that structure national identity in Argentina and South Africa over the period 1900 to 1994. In keeping with rhetorical criticism our aim is two-fold: to establish, for the first time, a comprehensive body of key speeches that should serve scholars and students alike in their study of the discursive tenets of two political societies across the South Atlantic; and to contribute significantly to an international body of studies on the "rhetoricity" of national identity formation and what has been termed "constitutive rhetoric".
Global Trends: A Rhetorical Study of Global Trends and Forecasting Discourse (2014-2016)
Lead investigator: Distinguished Professor Ph-J Salazar
Summary:
The project aims at providing a better understanding of the rhetorical functioning of persuasive communication set in motion by global forecasting agencies tasked with trends reports that have a global influence. The rationale and motivation for the project is to show how global trends reports and forecasting shape, frame and direct the definition of human agency at the level of international politics. The project, in its novelty, should broaden knowledge in this area of strategic studies itself, in addition to expanding the field of rhetorical criticism applied to politics.
Public Diplomacy Rhetoric
Principal Investigator: Ph-J Salazar
Sponsor: NRF, Competitive Programme for Rated Researchers/ Knowledge Fields Development Directorate
Duration: Mid-2010 to mid-2012
Summary:
The objective of the proposed project is a comparative study of rhetorical and communicative strategies of public diplomacy by mid-size countries that have emerged from a troubled past, and wish to play an international role, while they are attempting to develop a pragmatics of civil deliberation within. Public diplomacy indeed shapes outside perceptions while it shapes in return how a citizenry perceives itself (the notion of "interior state" developed by political rhetorician Christopher Castiglia). Public diplomacy is a set of what I have called and analyzed, in my book "Hyperpolitique", as "rhetorical technologies" that provide for a terrain to develop an ethical game plan, toward the outside, and toward the inside of a polity. The project intends to compare three similar polities - South Africa, Morocco, Argentina -, that have in common a recent political reassessment based on internal reconciliation, and a wish to project themselves as key regional agents in their own environment. All three draw on a rich and sustained intellectual debate and tradition on "what is civil deliberation". Public diplomacy plugs directly into public self-perceptions and projections of national ethos. It is more than a tool, it is a far-reaching technology of persuasive self-definition and, ultimately, of national cohesion.
SA Argentina Program
'New Beginnings': Argentina and South Africa. A comparative study in the rhetorical shaping of democracy
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Project Investigators:
Principal Investigators: Ph-J Salazar and Claudia Hilb (UBA)
Sponsor: NRF and Argentina Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation
GUN: 75930
Duration: April 2011 to March 2014
Summary:
Our Project deals with a comparative enquiry in the rhetorical shaping of democratic “new beginnings”. It compares the way in which the relations between truth, justice and politics as set in the new political realities of Argentina and South Africa, after their regime change, are shaped by public deliberative or rhetorical strategies and institutional settings that were put in place to create, sustain or restrain the difficult equation between those three factors. In both cases, the solutions that these countries came up with were considered exemplary and unprecedented. At the same time, there are substantial differences between the Argentine solution and the South African solution. In very simple terms, there is one emblematic difference between the two: in Argentina, the solution involved retributive justice, while in South Africa, the country opted for unveiling the truth. This difference in approach created, in our view, two different ways of “making democracy work” as they filtered through public discourse and shaped public deliberation (or “rhetorics”) regarding political agency and public responsibility in terms of “New Beginnings”. The objective of this Project is to examine the rhetorical shaping and the historical- political setting of truth, justice and the founding often heralded or labelled as “new beginnings” of democratic politics. The Project will first focus on the unprecedented foundational status of the truth- seeking commissions and of the trials of past crimes as the performative result of institutional settings and rhetorical strategies, and, secondly, on the ways in which the outcomes of these redress procedures have shaped public discourse beyond their immediate effect, or how, in short, Argentina and South Africa were fitted with new sets of rhetorical arguments regarding their “new beginnings” and, in terms of continental politics, their “exemplarity”. "Nuevos comienzos: Justicia, verdad y reconciliación en Argentina, Uruguay y Sudáfrica", Buenos Aires 6-7 December
SA Romania Program (2008 - 2011)- Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number
UID 67950
Disclaimer:
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto. IFRES sister site (in French) The Project is part of philosophy network OFFRES (Organisation for French-Speaking Research and Development in the Humanities) Arches, a journal in cross-disciplinary philosophy, will help disseminate outputs from the Project The Project's leaders are Professor Ciprian Mihali, Department of Philosophy, University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Rhetoric Studies, University of Cape Town.
Main objective of the Project:
A comparative study of Romanian and South African public debate regarding the public perception of social and human justice in terms of its rhetorical means and traditions. What is meant by justice is not the legal system, but how popular notions of fairness, redress, equity, even-handedness are rhetorically constructed by public agencies, how they are relayed by the media, and how they are objects of and for a critical re-evaluation of the principles and concrete manners of construction of the rule of law. The project takes into account how rhetorical modes are at work in the public deliberative sphere, which impose rethinking of the manner in which societies that had the experience of a totalitarian state and of apartheid deliberate on the rule of law. The project is innovative inasmuch as it is the first of its kind between Romania and South Africa, and brings together a common thinking on the law, rhetoric and public opinion. Of note, the Project benefits from the extensive network of Francophone philosophy to which the University of Cluj-Napoca is an active participant. The reporting language of the Project is English. However, commonality of interests and a common philosophical culture between the teams, will make French as a supplementary working instrument, thus bringing South African research in the field closer to its African context and helping a global dissemination of its results.
Background Papers:
Ciprian Mihali, Between sovereignty and precariousness: post-communist daily life condition
Report 1
Bridget Kwinda: The South African Justice system since 1994
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Report 2
Themba Ratsibe: Justice in South Africa
SA Norway Program (2007 - 2010)- Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number UID 64477
Disclaimer:
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Berit von der Lippe, Kairos and Bangladesh (in Norwegian). Working paper. Do not use without author's permission.
Aditi Bye Hunma, A rhetorical analysis of Nobel Lectures of Wangari Maathai, Rigoberta Menchu and Aung San Suu Kyi
Gender in the Deliberative Public Sphere
Berit von der Lippe, Images of Victory? Images of Masculinity? Nordicom Review 27 (2006) 1, 63-79. By courtesy of the author. Source material for the Project.
Berit von der Lippe, The gendered rhetoric silence. Working paper. Do not use without author's permission.
Working Papers (researchers: Ms Ruvimbo Goredema, Ms Aditi Hunma and Mr Themba Ratsibe)
Working Papers 1: Ruvimbo Goredema, Women and Media Representations
Women and Business Schools Advertising
Women and Glossy Magazines
Women as Rhetorical Agents of Peace
Working Paper 2: Aditi Hunma, Representation of Women in the Public Sphere
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Working Papers 3: Themba Ratsibe, Gender and Military Representations
War and Peace arguments
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Military and Gender
Summary of Findings
Sasol - Research Report July 2008
Supporting Data
Sasol Inzalo media presentation
Working Papers 5: Bridget Kwinda, Broad Based Black Empowerment and Gender
Supporting Documents
Transformation and Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa
Black Economic Empowerment: Addressing inequality in South Africa
Empowerment and the Private Sector
Individuals Who Are Products of Black Economic Empowerment
Working Papers 6: Philippa Levenberg ,Gender Rhetorical Ideographs
Gender and Ideographs
SA Morocco Program - Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number 2072981
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
PJ Salazar, L Mazibuko, T Ratsibe, Peaceful Civility After Civil Unrest: The Cases of South Africa and Morocco
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SA Poland Program 2003-2004 - Completed 2006-2008
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number 2063121
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Themba Ratsibe, Xenophobia:
Themba Ratsibe, President Mbeki's United Nations Speech.
Two Rhetorical Models for Participatory Citizenship in Post-Totalitarian Cultures 2003
Two Rhetorical Models for Participatory Citizenship in Post-Totalitarian Cultures 2004
PJ Salazar, Figures of The Republic, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 2007
Cezar M. Ornatowski, The Rhetorical Phenomenon of Lech Walesa. Plenary paper, Cape Town 2004. Published (under a different title) in Advances in the History of Rhetoric 8, 2005, 155-192 (by courtesy of the author).
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Cezar M Ornatowski, Rhetoric, Religion, and Politics in the Talks Between the Church and the Authorities in Poland, 1980-1989. Paper delivered at ISHR, 2007. To be published in Forum Artis Rhetoricae, 2007 (by courtesy of the author).
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Ruvimbo Goredema, Women in Public Office
SA Sweden Program - Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number 2067557
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Symposium Visual Rhetoric 21-22 October 2004
M Gebhuza, Women in High Office
GW Bush's Rhetoric! Read the book by Brigitte Mral, leader of the Project for the Swedish side: War Rhetoric after 9/11.
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SA Hungary Program - Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number 2067468
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
PJ Salazar, I Kovats, S Negsi, M Gebhuza, N Bucher, A Rhetorical Approach to ICTs in post-apartheid South Africa, NAWA, 2007.
Nicolas Péjout collaborated to the Project while a doctoral fellow at IFAS,Johannesburg The communication of communication. An illustration: the South African rhetorical promotion of ICTS
I Kovats, Public Service and Commercial Glocalisation frames of a media event of global importance
Ildikó Kováts and János Tölgyesi, The role of Internet in playing out a violent social conflict in Hungary: the assault on Gay Pride Parade in July 2007. Paper delivered at Euricom 2007, to be published in Javnost-The Public, 2008. By courtesy of the Authors.
N Bucher, A Rhetorical Analysis of the South African Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) Website.
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SA France Program - Completed
Material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant number 2059379
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Rhétoriques et droits Vérité et réconciliation après l'apartheid
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Proceedings of the international conference on Rhétorique et Droits after Apartheid, held in Paris, at the Academy, in June 2003. This document contains the last text written by Jacques Derrida on truth and forgiveness and one of the last texts written by Paul Ricoeur. It is the uncorrected version of the Proceedings, published by Le Genre Humain, 2004.
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Rhetorics of Control
Principal Investigator: Ph-J Salazar
Sponsor: NRF, Blue Skies Grant (GUN 81695)
Duration: 2012 - 2014
Summary:
Democratic societies, while they accord the highest value to public forms of persuasion, in essence the backbone of free speech and free communication, and constitutional politics and justice, have developed a wide range of practices of surveillance and intelligence that create, alongside a "field of autonomy", an ever- growing "field of control" which, in turn, is left mostly outside public debate or brought to the public attention as entertainment, fiction or as ways to better one's life or propel political "change" (typically, the added value of "social networks").
Public discourse is covertly and massively shaped and reshaped either by procedures of surveillance (CCTV cameras that monitor access to perimeters, as in "skid row" urban areas ; nanotechnologies of "somatic surveillance" developed by industry, the military and medical domains, and complex online systems) and by procedures of intelligence (data gathering preceding governmental action; instruments of so called "public" diplomacy; reformulation of science knowledge to shape opinion and influence elections; intelligence's use of social networking tools).
Most of these procedures are known to the specialists, and most democratic countries have in place some form of procedures for parliamentary or regulatory accountability.
However, little is debated about them in public concerning their actual effects on democratic discourse. In light of recent disclosures on "Wikileaks" and immediate, ill- informed and reactive debates over the loss of privacy inherent in social networking tools such as Facebook, the deeper, reflective and long-term corollary issue is both how institutions make public claims about the necessity of keeping secrets and undertaking covert surveillance (both domestic and international); and how intelligence gathering and surveillance practices traditionally associated with the state have been introduced to forms of everyday interaction, and thus covertly 'normalised.'