Books by Greg Dickinson
Routledge, 2019
The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to b... more The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to both his general manner of speaking as well as to his preferred modality. Trump’s manner, the authors argue, reflects an aesthetics of white rage, and it is rooted in authoritarianism, narcissism, and demagoguery. His preferred modality of speaking, namely through Twitter, effectively channels and transmits the affective dimensions of white rage by taking advantage of the platform’s defining characteristics, which include simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility. There is, then, a structural homology between Trump’s general communication practices and the specific platform (Twitter) he uses to communicate with his base. This commonality between communication practices and communication platform (manner and modality) struck a powerful emotive chord with his followers, who feel aggrieved at the decentering of white masculinity. In addition to charting the defining characteristics of Trump’s discourse, The Twitter Presidency exposes how Trump’s rhetorical style threatens democratic norms, principles, and institutions.
Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, mall... more Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue.
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.
"Bringing together 50 key readings on rhetorical criticism in a single accessible format, The Rhe... more "Bringing together 50 key readings on rhetorical criticism in a single accessible format, The Rhetorical Criticism Reader furnishes instructors with an ideal resource for teaching and practicing the art of rhetorical criticism. Unlike existing readers and textbooks, which rely on cookie-cutter approaches to rhetorical criticism, The Rhetorical Criticism Reader organizes the field conceptually, allowing teachers and students to grapple with the enduring issues and debates surrounding criticism over the past 50 years.
The readings are organized into four sections, each representing key conceptual issues and debates in rhetorical criticism: critic/purpose, object/method, theory/practice, and audience/consequentiality. Each section is preceded by an introductory essay that puts the readings into context. For added flexibility, an alternative table of contents is also included for instructors and students to customize their teaching and reading.
Intended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical criticism, The Rhetorical Criticism Reader uniquely lends itself to thoughtful discussion of the role of the critic in the critical process. It assists readers not only in learning the tools of criticism, but also in reflecting on the values that underlie the critical endeavor.
Reviews:
"An inspired conversation between reflections on the activity of criticism and models of exemplary criticism, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism provides a superb introduction to the key theoretical debates in rhetorical criticism."
--Sonja K. Foss, Department of Communication, University of Colorado - Denver
"Ott and Dickinson’s reader on rhetorical criticism features 50 thoughtfully selected essays, which exemplify several accomplished critics’ conceptually-driven, generative practices for criticism of public advocacy, while exploring the intricate relationships between theory and practice. Offering a conversational and dialogic orientation to rhetorical criticism as an alternative to a methods approach, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism is an exceptional resource for teaching criticism to graduate students and advanced undergraduates."
--Lester C. Olson, Professor of Communication and Women's Studies & Chancellor’s Distinguished Teacher, University of Pittsburgh"
Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains c... more Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles.
Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organizational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance.
By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimized or erased.
Papers by Greg Dickinson
Increasingly, scholars have turned to the urban built environment as a medium of communication in... more Increasingly, scholars have turned to the urban built environment as a medium of communication in its own right. The bricks and mortar of cities are communicative insofar as they shape, constrain, and ultimately also mediate the everyday lives of individuals and communities. We draw on our own and others’ work in the broader field of rhetorical studies to state that “being through there” matters as a methodological approach to examining the urban built environment as a key form of mediation. Looking both backward and forward, we argue that this approach to studying the city is centered on three key concepts: materiality, bodies, and movement. This means that we must directly engage as fully embodied communication scholars with the built landscape, with temporality, and in movement. We therefore offer a number of examples to show communication scholars how to bring their own material possibilities into experiencing contact with the urban built environment, how to reconstruct urban la...
Visual Communication, 2014
In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 20... more In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. They offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe and Asia. They then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity and argue that, while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with g...
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2012
Review of Communication, Jan 1, 2004
Review of Communication, Jan 1, 2007
Journal Articles by Greg Dickinson
Research Outreach, 2021
Communication technologies lie at the heart of every society, and their structural biases contrib... more Communication technologies lie at the heart of every society, and their structural biases contribute to many of our social biases. The use of social media, and especially Twitter, by former US president Trump
offers a case study in how the rise of social media is driving populism, divisive rhetoric, and harm to our socio-political landscape. Dr Brian Ott at Missouri State University and Dr Greg Dickinson at Colorado State University have identified three fundamental biases of Twitter – simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility – each of which were leveraged by
@realDonaldTrump.
Western Journal of Communication, 2019
Performing rhetorical criticism of built spaces offers powerful insight into quotidian
and subli... more Performing rhetorical criticism of built spaces offers powerful insight into quotidian
and sublime rhetorical performances. The strongest forms of this criticism remakes the
critical and demands a reimagining of the critic and their role in analyzing the
textures of the rhetorical artifact. This reimagining depends on the careful consideration
of bodies and materiality. I argue for considering rhetorical textures—rather than
rhetorical texts—as a way to rethink some of criticism’s traditional terms including
text and context, author, audience, and consequence.
Political Science Quarterly, 2020
Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 2019
This essay redefines rhetoric in a manner that takes seriously the suasory character of matter-en... more This essay redefines rhetoric in a manner that takes seriously the suasory character of matter-energy. Specifically, rhetoric is defined as the capacity of the thing-symbol—via its aesthetic qualities and signifying practices—to generate affect and discourse, whose intertwined sensory and cognitive processing elicit presence and
meaning effects in a particular space-time. After charting and explaining the key relations among the constituent elements that comprise this conception of rhetoric, the advantages of studying rhetoric’s materiality in critical practice are discussed.
Western Journal of Communication, Jan 1, 2010
Western Journal of Communication, Jan 1, 2006
Western Journal of Communication, Jan 1, 2008
The shopping center is a major part of consumer space built in the U.S., and the shifts in shoppi... more The shopping center is a major part of consumer space built in the U.S., and the shifts in shopping center design are part of the changing landscape of American consumer culture. In this essay we examine FlatIron Crossing, a mall and lifestyle center recently built in Colorado, to explore the development of the hybrid space as a response to postmodern suburbanization. We argue that FlatIron Crossing is a place making technology that offers invocations of locality as a response to the abstractions and placelessness of postmodern suburbanization. Locality, we argue, is different from ''local'' in that locality offers images of place rooted in time and geography but drawn from globalized images. Even as recent shopping centers and lifestyle centers offer images of place they do so to cover, without directly addressing, the difficult relation between the global and the local.
Communication and Critical/cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2004
The authors examine two Time magazine cover images: O.J. Simpson, after his arrest for the murder... more The authors examine two Time magazine cover images: O.J. Simpson, after his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown, and Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater controversy, arguing that the Time covers function as a visual rhetoric, invoking myths central to Western culture. The photos naturalize deep, cultural myths which assert that black men and women of all colors are evil, thereby re-centering white masculinity.
Uploads
Books by Greg Dickinson
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.
The readings are organized into four sections, each representing key conceptual issues and debates in rhetorical criticism: critic/purpose, object/method, theory/practice, and audience/consequentiality. Each section is preceded by an introductory essay that puts the readings into context. For added flexibility, an alternative table of contents is also included for instructors and students to customize their teaching and reading.
Intended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical criticism, The Rhetorical Criticism Reader uniquely lends itself to thoughtful discussion of the role of the critic in the critical process. It assists readers not only in learning the tools of criticism, but also in reflecting on the values that underlie the critical endeavor.
Reviews:
"An inspired conversation between reflections on the activity of criticism and models of exemplary criticism, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism provides a superb introduction to the key theoretical debates in rhetorical criticism."
--Sonja K. Foss, Department of Communication, University of Colorado - Denver
"Ott and Dickinson’s reader on rhetorical criticism features 50 thoughtfully selected essays, which exemplify several accomplished critics’ conceptually-driven, generative practices for criticism of public advocacy, while exploring the intricate relationships between theory and practice. Offering a conversational and dialogic orientation to rhetorical criticism as an alternative to a methods approach, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism is an exceptional resource for teaching criticism to graduate students and advanced undergraduates."
--Lester C. Olson, Professor of Communication and Women's Studies & Chancellor’s Distinguished Teacher, University of Pittsburgh"
Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organizational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance.
By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimized or erased.
Papers by Greg Dickinson
Journal Articles by Greg Dickinson
offers a case study in how the rise of social media is driving populism, divisive rhetoric, and harm to our socio-political landscape. Dr Brian Ott at Missouri State University and Dr Greg Dickinson at Colorado State University have identified three fundamental biases of Twitter – simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility – each of which were leveraged by
@realDonaldTrump.
and sublime rhetorical performances. The strongest forms of this criticism remakes the
critical and demands a reimagining of the critic and their role in analyzing the
textures of the rhetorical artifact. This reimagining depends on the careful consideration
of bodies and materiality. I argue for considering rhetorical textures—rather than
rhetorical texts—as a way to rethink some of criticism’s traditional terms including
text and context, author, audience, and consequence.
meaning effects in a particular space-time. After charting and explaining the key relations among the constituent elements that comprise this conception of rhetoric, the advantages of studying rhetoric’s materiality in critical practice are discussed.
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.
The readings are organized into four sections, each representing key conceptual issues and debates in rhetorical criticism: critic/purpose, object/method, theory/practice, and audience/consequentiality. Each section is preceded by an introductory essay that puts the readings into context. For added flexibility, an alternative table of contents is also included for instructors and students to customize their teaching and reading.
Intended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical criticism, The Rhetorical Criticism Reader uniquely lends itself to thoughtful discussion of the role of the critic in the critical process. It assists readers not only in learning the tools of criticism, but also in reflecting on the values that underlie the critical endeavor.
Reviews:
"An inspired conversation between reflections on the activity of criticism and models of exemplary criticism, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism provides a superb introduction to the key theoretical debates in rhetorical criticism."
--Sonja K. Foss, Department of Communication, University of Colorado - Denver
"Ott and Dickinson’s reader on rhetorical criticism features 50 thoughtfully selected essays, which exemplify several accomplished critics’ conceptually-driven, generative practices for criticism of public advocacy, while exploring the intricate relationships between theory and practice. Offering a conversational and dialogic orientation to rhetorical criticism as an alternative to a methods approach, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism is an exceptional resource for teaching criticism to graduate students and advanced undergraduates."
--Lester C. Olson, Professor of Communication and Women's Studies & Chancellor’s Distinguished Teacher, University of Pittsburgh"
Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organizational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance.
By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimized or erased.
offers a case study in how the rise of social media is driving populism, divisive rhetoric, and harm to our socio-political landscape. Dr Brian Ott at Missouri State University and Dr Greg Dickinson at Colorado State University have identified three fundamental biases of Twitter – simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility – each of which were leveraged by
@realDonaldTrump.
and sublime rhetorical performances. The strongest forms of this criticism remakes the
critical and demands a reimagining of the critic and their role in analyzing the
textures of the rhetorical artifact. This reimagining depends on the careful consideration
of bodies and materiality. I argue for considering rhetorical textures—rather than
rhetorical texts—as a way to rethink some of criticism’s traditional terms including
text and context, author, audience, and consequence.
meaning effects in a particular space-time. After charting and explaining the key relations among the constituent elements that comprise this conception of rhetoric, the advantages of studying rhetoric’s materiality in critical practice are discussed.
Wyoming, was redesigned—its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the
structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a
thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue that the redesigned Whitney Gallery
of Western Art performs a sacred hymn that—in repositioning Buffalo Bill Cody as its orchestrating figure—resolves
discordant images and narratives of the West, harmonizes diverse themes into a single vision, and reconstitutes national
identity in terms of the Western sublime.
Cities are central to the media landscapes and communication practices of our times, ranging from the wide appeal of urban popular cultures and the global resonance of protests in squares to the ubiquity of public screens and locative media in urban space. Over the past decade, scholars have become increasingly interested in cities because a close look at urban life may offer answers to important questions about contemporary media and communication: How do individuals and communities interact through the media or face-to-face in urban settings? How does the urban built environment shape and constrain the everyday lives of city dwellers? How do dominant narratives about cities promote particular forms of civic engagement and social change?
The networks, proximities, creativities, and inequalities that animate cities are at the heart of some of the major debates that sustain the discipline.
Urban communication scholarship is concerned with the ways in which people connect (or don’t connect) with others and with their urban environment via symbolic, technological and/or material means. This Special Section on methods and methodologies for urban communication research breaks new
ground. For the first time, a group of established scholars reflect systematically on how research on urban communication is done, why particular questions matter, and how they and others have examined specific aspects of the urban/communication nexus.
Guest-edited by Giorgia Aiello and Simone Tosoni, this Special Section features seven original articles that cover different disciplinary points of view, including documentary (Daniel Makagon, Mary Rachel Gould), audiencing (Simone Tosoni, Seija Ridell), material (Greg Dickinson, Giorgia Aiello), visual (Luc Pauwels), mixed-method (Matthew D. Matsaganis), ecological (Stephen Coleman, Nancy Thumim, Giles Moss), and applied (Susan Drucker, Gary Gumpert) perspectives on urban communication.
The Special Section works as a springboard for a timely and much-needed conversation on the key methodological principles, processes and practices that underlie urban communication as an area of inquiry in its own right. Taken together, the articles highlight the multifaceted nature of this body of work and invite scholars to keep reflecting on how media and communication research can produce groundbreaking empirical knowledge on cities. Even more, these articles show that research in and on cities may fundamentally change current outlooks on media and communication as a whole.