Bryan C Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 184448 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bryan C Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bryan C |
| FAMILY NAME | Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | TAYLOR B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5955-521X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication?
What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication?
A fearful engine of power
This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication research concerned with ‘security.’ It opens by defining this concept, and discussing recent geopolitical and interdisciplinary trends contributing to its association with communication. It subsequently reviews distinctive engagement with ‘security’ displayed in five disciplinary subfields, including strategic communication, discourse analysis, public argument studies, rhetoric, and…
The movie has to go forward’
This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication scholarship devoted to the relationship between media and security. It begins by reviewing communication’s disciplinary history surrounding this relationship, and recent trends stimulating the convergence of media and security scholarship. It surveys five prominent research programmes offering distinctive images of the media–security relationship: visual securitization, media framin…
Conceptualizing multicultural discourses of security
This introduction to the special issue reviews recent developments in interdisciplinary scholarship on security, discourse, and culture. It then reviews recent work in fields of critical intercultural studies to associate these developments with the commitments of Cultural Discourse Studies. It concludes by previewing the essays collected for this issue
Expression
Expression is a basic concept in both scholarly theories and vernacular understandings of communication. It was terminologically derived from the Latin verb meaning to press out a physical substance, but over time came to signify representation practiced through art, language, or other symbols. Its deep conceptual roots in the West are found in ancient Greco‐Roman rhetoric; it traverses the canons of both delivery and style (whose Latin name, elo…
Experience
Experience is the distinctive quality of human consciousness in which ongoing existence makes itself available for meaningful reflection and interpretation. Experience commonly denotes a continuous quality of perception, in which embodied human interaction with the environment generates complex sensory information that is filtered by existing cognitive schemata. “Experience” has subsequently generated four connotations: a baseline stratum of perc…
Meaning
The term “meaning” conceptualizes a fundamental object of explanation in the study of communication, one whose status may be characterized as alternately ubiquitous, mundane, elusive, and compelling. Broadly, “the meaning of meaning” is generated in intellectual traditions that conceptualize the nature of, and the relationships among, three distinct sets of phenomena: (1) an external, material reality, which forms the object of human experience a…
Imitation (In)Security
Contemporary media culture frequently associates security with imitation. This essay theorizes critique of related textuality within the contemporary “media/security nexus.” It advocates for enhanced usage of mimetic theory to critique media representation of security, as that condition is pursued through cultural practices of adaptation, disguise, and simulation. Two competing traditions of mimetic theory are reviewed, along with their appropria…
A Hedge against the Future”
Rhetoric has traditionally played an important role in constituting the nuclear future, yet that role has changed significantly since the declared end of the Cold War. Viewed from the perspectives of nuclear criticism and postmodern theories of risk and security, current rhetoric of US nuclear modernization demonstrates how contingencies of voice and persona mediate the success of official depictions of the future as a warrant for proposals to in…
The Means to Match Their Hatred”
The persistence of nuclear weapons evokes four critical issues: they continue to pose significant risk in the absence of compelling security needs; they embody technological autonomy and institutional indifference to democratic deliberation; they are represented in mythic and religious presidential rhetoric that hypocritically celebrates American virtue while unproductively demonizing nuclear opponents; and they remain understudied by rhetorical …
Checking the Map
Journal Article Checking the Map: Critiquing Joanne Martin's Metatheory of Organizational Culture and Its Uses in Communication Research Get access Bryan C. Taylor, Bryan C. Taylor 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lisa R. Irvin, Lisa R. Irvin 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for ot…
Nuclear Legacies
This chapter engages communication surrounding the history and future of U.S. nuclear weapons production. The authors begin by arguing that these phenomena are normalized, and thus neglected, among citizens and communication scholars, and respond by reviewing the history of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and by characterizing communication among its associated organizations and communities. They then examine the material and discursi…
Organizing the “unknown subject”
This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to analyze cultural discourse about nuclear espionage, focusing on the case of Klaus Fuchs as depicted in Robert Chadwell Williams' 1987 biography, Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy. For a variety of reasons, modernist biography is often frustrated in the attempt to depict subjects as unique and coherent individuals. Biographies of Los Alamos spies are shaped by intertextuality, in which their subjects continually re…
“National security, and all that it implies …”
Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxv + 299 pp., $19.95. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. xii + 242 pp., $15.95. Don DeLillo, Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. 827 pp.: $16.00. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Cambridge, MA: Blackw…
Browsing the culture
This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake Ci…
Organizational Communication and Cultural Studies
Recently, we have been struggling to interpret a series of minor yet absurd spectacles that span the industrial and popular-cultural realms. These events have compelled our scholarly interest, but lack a ready-made frame for diagnosing their significance. Consider these examples: In the summer of 1996, vivacious 'TV talk-show cohost Kathie Lee Gifford was criticized by activists who linked her line of Wal-Mart clothing to human-rights abuses and …
Revis(it)ing nuclear history
Nuclear criticism theorizes culture as the site of struggle between ideological narratives seeking authority over the meaning of nuclear symbols. Following the end of the cold war, various groups have conducted this struggle through public discourse about U.S. nuclear weapons organizations. This paper examines symbolic conflict over the history and future of one such organization, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This conflict was conducted be…
Make Bomb, Save World
Fat man and little boy
Throughout the nuclear age, popular‐cultural texts have oriented audiences to the Bomb, and to the organizations that design, produce and deploy it. Collectively, these texts reflect a mixture of patriotism, awe, dread, and opposition to nuclear weapons. This essay explores one film text of a principal event in nuclear history: the construction of the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. The ironic "problems" of the 1989 …
Register of the repressed
Symbolic forms play an important role in mediating cultural knowledge of nuclear weapons. One recurring form in postwar cultural texts is the nuclear weapons organization—the various groups using labor, technology and materials to design, manufacture and deploy the Bomb. Several of these texts depict the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. Conventionally, these texts privilege masculine, rational and techno…
The politics of the nuclear text
Nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war are daunting “facts” of contemporary culture. Nonetheless, they are symbolic productions: the meaning of the Bomb historically has been created in a cultural dialogue between conflicting interests. This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to explore the utility of a key signifier in that dialogue, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. During the 1980s, critics interpreted a published volume of Oppenhe…
Checking the Map
Journal Article Checking the Map: Critiquing Joanne Martin's Metatheory of Organizational Culture and Its Uses in Communication Research Get access Bryan C. Taylor, Bryan C. Taylor 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lisa R. Irvin, Lisa R. Irvin 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for ot…
The politics of the nuclear text
Nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war are daunting “facts” of contemporary culture. Nonetheless, they are symbolic productions: the meaning of the Bomb historically has been created in a cultural dialogue between conflicting interests. This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to explore the utility of a key signifier in that dialogue, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. During the 1980s, critics interpreted a published volume of Oppenhe…
The Means to Match Their Hatred”
The persistence of nuclear weapons evokes four critical issues: they continue to pose significant risk in the absence of compelling security needs; they embody technological autonomy and institutional indifference to democratic deliberation; they are represented in mythic and religious presidential rhetoric that hypocritically celebrates American virtue while unproductively demonizing nuclear opponents; and they remain understudied by rhetorical …
Make Bomb, Save World
Register of the repressed
Symbolic forms play an important role in mediating cultural knowledge of nuclear weapons. One recurring form in postwar cultural texts is the nuclear weapons organization—the various groups using labor, technology and materials to design, manufacture and deploy the Bomb. Several of these texts depict the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. Conventionally, these texts privilege masculine, rational and techno…
A Hedge against the Future”
Rhetoric has traditionally played an important role in constituting the nuclear future, yet that role has changed significantly since the declared end of the Cold War. Viewed from the perspectives of nuclear criticism and postmodern theories of risk and security, current rhetoric of US nuclear modernization demonstrates how contingencies of voice and persona mediate the success of official depictions of the future as a warrant for proposals to in…
The movie has to go forward’
This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication scholarship devoted to the relationship between media and security. It begins by reviewing communication’s disciplinary history surrounding this relationship, and recent trends stimulating the convergence of media and security scholarship. It surveys five prominent research programmes offering distinctive images of the media–security relationship: visual securitization, media framin…
Imitation (In)Security
Contemporary media culture frequently associates security with imitation. This essay theorizes critique of related textuality within the contemporary “media/security nexus.” It advocates for enhanced usage of mimetic theory to critique media representation of security, as that condition is pursued through cultural practices of adaptation, disguise, and simulation. Two competing traditions of mimetic theory are reviewed, along with their appropria…
Organizing the “unknown subject”
This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to analyze cultural discourse about nuclear espionage, focusing on the case of Klaus Fuchs as depicted in Robert Chadwell Williams' 1987 biography, Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy. For a variety of reasons, modernist biography is often frustrated in the attempt to depict subjects as unique and coherent individuals. Biographies of Los Alamos spies are shaped by intertextuality, in which their subjects continually re…
The politics of the nuclear text
Nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war are daunting “facts” of contemporary culture. Nonetheless, they are symbolic productions: the meaning of the Bomb historically has been created in a cultural dialogue between conflicting interests. This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to explore the utility of a key signifier in that dialogue, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. During the 1980s, critics interpreted a published volume of Oppenhe…
Fat man and little boy
Throughout the nuclear age, popular‐cultural texts have oriented audiences to the Bomb, and to the organizations that design, produce and deploy it. Collectively, these texts reflect a mixture of patriotism, awe, dread, and opposition to nuclear weapons. This essay explores one film text of a principal event in nuclear history: the construction of the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. The ironic "problems" of the 1989 …
Register of the repressed
Symbolic forms play an important role in mediating cultural knowledge of nuclear weapons. One recurring form in postwar cultural texts is the nuclear weapons organization—the various groups using labor, technology and materials to design, manufacture and deploy the Bomb. Several of these texts depict the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. Conventionally, these texts privilege masculine, rational and techno…
Make Bomb, Save World
Revis(it)ing nuclear history
Nuclear criticism theorizes culture as the site of struggle between ideological narratives seeking authority over the meaning of nuclear symbols. Following the end of the cold war, various groups have conducted this struggle through public discourse about U.S. nuclear weapons organizations. This paper examines symbolic conflict over the history and future of one such organization, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This conflict was conducted be…
Organizational Communication and Cultural Studies
Recently, we have been struggling to interpret a series of minor yet absurd spectacles that span the industrial and popular-cultural realms. These events have compelled our scholarly interest, but lack a ready-made frame for diagnosing their significance. Consider these examples: In the summer of 1996, vivacious 'TV talk-show cohost Kathie Lee Gifford was criticized by activists who linked her line of Wal-Mart clothing to human-rights abuses and …
Browsing the culture
This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake Ci…
“National security, and all that it implies …”
Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxv + 299 pp., $19.95. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. xii + 242 pp., $15.95. Don DeLillo, Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. 827 pp.: $16.00. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Cambridge, MA: Blackw…
Organizing the “unknown subject”
This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to analyze cultural discourse about nuclear espionage, focusing on the case of Klaus Fuchs as depicted in Robert Chadwell Williams' 1987 biography, Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy. For a variety of reasons, modernist biography is often frustrated in the attempt to depict subjects as unique and coherent individuals. Biographies of Los Alamos spies are shaped by intertextuality, in which their subjects continually re…
Nuclear Legacies
This chapter engages communication surrounding the history and future of U.S. nuclear weapons production. The authors begin by arguing that these phenomena are normalized, and thus neglected, among citizens and communication scholars, and respond by reviewing the history of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and by characterizing communication among its associated organizations and communities. They then examine the material and discursi…
Checking the Map
Journal Article Checking the Map: Critiquing Joanne Martin's Metatheory of Organizational Culture and Its Uses in Communication Research Get access Bryan C. Taylor, Bryan C. Taylor 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lisa R. Irvin, Lisa R. Irvin 1Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0270 Search for ot…
The Means to Match Their Hatred”
The persistence of nuclear weapons evokes four critical issues: they continue to pose significant risk in the absence of compelling security needs; they embody technological autonomy and institutional indifference to democratic deliberation; they are represented in mythic and religious presidential rhetoric that hypocritically celebrates American virtue while unproductively demonizing nuclear opponents; and they remain understudied by rhetorical …
A Hedge against the Future”
Rhetoric has traditionally played an important role in constituting the nuclear future, yet that role has changed significantly since the declared end of the Cold War. Viewed from the perspectives of nuclear criticism and postmodern theories of risk and security, current rhetoric of US nuclear modernization demonstrates how contingencies of voice and persona mediate the success of official depictions of the future as a warrant for proposals to in…
Expression
Expression is a basic concept in both scholarly theories and vernacular understandings of communication. It was terminologically derived from the Latin verb meaning to press out a physical substance, but over time came to signify representation practiced through art, language, or other symbols. Its deep conceptual roots in the West are found in ancient Greco‐Roman rhetoric; it traverses the canons of both delivery and style (whose Latin name, elo…
Experience
Experience is the distinctive quality of human consciousness in which ongoing existence makes itself available for meaningful reflection and interpretation. Experience commonly denotes a continuous quality of perception, in which embodied human interaction with the environment generates complex sensory information that is filtered by existing cognitive schemata. “Experience” has subsequently generated four connotations: a baseline stratum of perc…
Meaning
The term “meaning” conceptualizes a fundamental object of explanation in the study of communication, one whose status may be characterized as alternately ubiquitous, mundane, elusive, and compelling. Broadly, “the meaning of meaning” is generated in intellectual traditions that conceptualize the nature of, and the relationships among, three distinct sets of phenomena: (1) an external, material reality, which forms the object of human experience a…
Imitation (In)Security
Contemporary media culture frequently associates security with imitation. This essay theorizes critique of related textuality within the contemporary “media/security nexus.” It advocates for enhanced usage of mimetic theory to critique media representation of security, as that condition is pursued through cultural practices of adaptation, disguise, and simulation. Two competing traditions of mimetic theory are reviewed, along with their appropria…
A fearful engine of power
This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication research concerned with ‘security.’ It opens by defining this concept, and discussing recent geopolitical and interdisciplinary trends contributing to its association with communication. It subsequently reviews distinctive engagement with ‘security’ displayed in five disciplinary subfields, including strategic communication, discourse analysis, public argument studies, rhetoric, and…
The movie has to go forward’
This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication scholarship devoted to the relationship between media and security. It begins by reviewing communication’s disciplinary history surrounding this relationship, and recent trends stimulating the convergence of media and security scholarship. It surveys five prominent research programmes offering distinctive images of the media–security relationship: visual securitization, media framin…
Conceptualizing multicultural discourses of security
This introduction to the special issue reviews recent developments in interdisciplinary scholarship on security, discourse, and culture. It then reviews recent work in fields of critical intercultural studies to associate these developments with the commitments of Cultural Discourse Studies. It concludes by previewing the essays collected for this issue
What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication?
What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication?
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (10 works) · Nuclear weapon (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)