Robert Asen
Biographic Data
| ID | 4078638 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Asen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Asen |
| SIGNATURE | ASEN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Futures for rhetoric and democracy
Tracing the evolution of online anti-woke publics: Right-wing education rhetoric in the Daily Signal and City Journal
This essay critically examines the online education discourse of the City Journal and Daily Signal—the public-facing news and commentary websites of the influential think tanks the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation, respectively. Tracing the evolution of anti-woke publics longitudinally, we analyze materials from the summer 2020 racial justice protests through the November 2022 U.S. midterm elections. Our analysis explores how these…
Anti-Woke Publics
A market for civil rights: Whiteness as property, colorblindness, and the rhetoric of school choice
In this essay, I focus on the advocacy of Betsy DeVos as a prominent exemplar of a larger trend among U.S. pro-market education advocates asserting school choice as a contemporary stage of the nation’s long struggle for civil rights. I argue that as DeVos championed her cause, she repurposed this right from a civil right seeking justice and equality to a property right serving privilege and the protection of whiteness as property. Engaging the fo…
Weaving intimacies: Grace and connection in scholarly community
This special forum was convened to honor the memory of Dr. Daniel C. Brouwer, who died in May 2021. Each contribution is coauthored to specifically honor his commitments to collaboration as a key form of scholarly inquiry, co-mentoring, ethical relationships, and community building. Each essay focuses on an aspect of Brouwer's scholarship, exploring topical, methodological, and theoretical interventions to generate insights and reflections for th…
Knowledge, Communication, and Anti-Critical Publicity: The Friedmans’ Market Public
Focusing on the writings of Milton and Rose Friedman, this article explicates a model of a market public as the normative mode of public engagement in a neoliberal regime of governance. The Friedmans’ market public narrowly construes conceptions of knowledge as arising from direct experience and communication as information exchange. Knowledge as direct experience supports the putative universality of self-interest and the sovereignty of individu…
Introduction: Neoliberalism and the public sphere
In contemporary scholarship, the term “neoliberalism” seemingly appears everywhere. Rather than seeking to develop a single definition that unifies these varied appearances, scholars in various disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary domains may develop critical conceptualizations that inform particular, active areas of inquiry. This special issue represents such an effort for rhetorical and communication scholarship on the public sphe…
Reconsidering symbolic use: A situational model of the use of research evidence in polarised legislative hearings
Participating in the growing scholarly attention to the roles of rhetoric and argumentation in policymaking, we examine how the use of research evidence operates in explicitly argumentative legislative hearings characterised by partisanship and polarisation. Conducting a rhetorical analysis of three legislative hearings in the US state of Wisconsin, we discovered that partisanship and polarisation did not influence argument and the use of researc…
The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy
Few forces have battered contemporary American politics as much as resentment. It may be only a small exaggeration to say that, at times, our politics have been driven by resentment. Harnessing res
Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good
This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordi…
Communication is the public
Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited: What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go Into the Field
As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the au…
Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship
Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alterna…
Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush on Education Reform: Ascribing Agency and Responsibility through Key Policy Terms
This article explores Lyndon Baines Johnsons and George W. Bushs use of key policy terms to justify their education policies. President Johnson foregrounded the key policy term of "opportunity," whereas President Bush emphasized the term "accountability." Conveying a confident, forward-looking view of society opportunity charged the federal government with distributing educational resources among local communities. Replacing confidence with skept…
Should Scholars Delineate a Data Set Apart from a Research Project? Considering Objects, Methods, and Purposes for Studying Presidential Rhetoric
Rather than identifying a data set prior to engaging in scholarship, we need to consider how scholars' choices of which presidential speeches to study depend importantly on their understanding of objects, methods, and purposes of analysis. Presidential speeches may be understood as discrete, meaningful texts and/or as parts of larger bodies of discourse. In either case, speech making may proceed in a moment that advocates and audiences alike appr…
Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life
Public modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life
Bringing together scholars in rhetorical, cultural, and media studies, this collection of new case studies illustrates a modalities approach to the study of publics. These case studies explore the implications of different ways of forming publics, including alternative means of expression, the intersection of politics and consumerism, and online engagement. In doing so, they raise important questions of access, community, and political efficacy.-…
Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy
This article situates public policy as a mediation of rhetorical and material forces. From this perspective, public policy draws on the constitutive and consequential power of rhetoric as well as other factors like institutional authority and financial resources. As a constellation of multifarious forces, public policy refigures the text as process, which raises issues of authorship, temporality, and polysemy differently than singular speech text…
Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy
Introduction| March 01 2010 Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy Robert Asen Robert Asen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955588 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Asen; Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2010; 13 (1): 1–5. doi: http…
Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia
As a conceptual term, "counterpublic" serves scholarship best when contributing to a critical-theory project, which means that particular constellations of materiality and ideology may bolster some calls for counterpublicity while gainsaying others. This may be investigated by examining how a text upholds or betrays an advocate's values, seeking out textual markers of access and influence that belie claims of marginalization, and assessing whethe…
A discourse theory of citizenship
This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenship recognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful, potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievable democratic practices…
Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (Rhetoric and Public Affairs)
Images shape the debate surrounding poverty. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally uncontroversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation completed a retrenchment era in welfare p…
Nixon's Welfare Reform: Enacting Historical Contradictions of Poverty Discourses
This essay examines a 1969 speech by President Nixon that introduced Americans to his Family Assistance Plan, a welfare reform proposal that would have provided poor families with a minimum income guarantee. I argue that historical contradictions of poverty discourses informed Nixon's speech and frustrated his attempt to articulate a new approach to federal welfare policy.
Seeking the "Counter," in Counterpublics
As conceptual models of the public sphere have moved toward multiplicity, “counterpublic” has emerged as a critical term to signify that some publics develop not simply as one among a constellation of discursive entities, but as explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that exclude the interests of potential participants. This essay attempts to forestall potential reductionism in future counterpublic theory by considering through 3 “o…
Appreciation and desire: The male nude in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe
The representations of male bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe's nudes invite viewers to assume divergent and potentially contesting receptive stances. These different responses are enabled by the structural ambiguities of the photographs themselves. Mapplethorpe's male nudes appropriate past images and associations that evoke the canonical, classical genre of the nude as well as the artist's past work to present his models simultaneously as formal ob…
Seeking the "Counter," in Counterpublics
As conceptual models of the public sphere have moved toward multiplicity, “counterpublic” has emerged as a critical term to signify that some publics develop not simply as one among a constellation of discursive entities, but as explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that exclude the interests of potential participants. This essay attempts to forestall potential reductionism in future counterpublic theory by considering through 3 “o…
A discourse theory of citizenship
This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenship recognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful, potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievable democratic practices…
Anti-Woke Publics
Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good
This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordi…
Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship
Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alterna…
Constructing the objects of our discourse: The welfare wars, the orphanage, and the silenced welfare mom
Recent welfare reform debates featured the return of the orphanage as a talked‐about policy initiative. This institution's sudden return presented a problem for both its supporters and its detractors. Both groups had to make sense of the orphanage as they argued for or against its efficacy. Through our discourse we resolve such problems, Michel Foucault explains, constructing the objects about which we speak. Several strategies were deployed to c…
Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush on Education Reform: Ascribing Agency and Responsibility through Key Policy Terms
This article explores Lyndon Baines Johnsons and George W. Bushs use of key policy terms to justify their education policies. President Johnson foregrounded the key policy term of "opportunity," whereas President Bush emphasized the term "accountability." Conveying a confident, forward-looking view of society opportunity charged the federal government with distributing educational resources among local communities. Replacing confidence with skept…
Appreciation and desire: The male nude in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe
The representations of male bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe's nudes invite viewers to assume divergent and potentially contesting receptive stances. These different responses are enabled by the structural ambiguities of the photographs themselves. Mapplethorpe's male nudes appropriate past images and associations that evoke the canonical, classical genre of the nude as well as the artist's past work to present his models simultaneously as formal ob…
Reconsidering symbolic use: A situational model of the use of research evidence in polarised legislative hearings
Participating in the growing scholarly attention to the roles of rhetoric and argumentation in policymaking, we examine how the use of research evidence operates in explicitly argumentative legislative hearings characterised by partisanship and polarisation. Conducting a rhetorical analysis of three legislative hearings in the US state of Wisconsin, we discovered that partisanship and polarisation did not influence argument and the use of researc…
Communication is the public
Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited: What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go Into the Field
As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the au…
Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy
This article situates public policy as a mediation of rhetorical and material forces. From this perspective, public policy draws on the constitutive and consequential power of rhetoric as well as other factors like institutional authority and financial resources. As a constellation of multifarious forces, public policy refigures the text as process, which raises issues of authorship, temporality, and polysemy differently than singular speech text…
Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia
As a conceptual term, "counterpublic" serves scholarship best when contributing to a critical-theory project, which means that particular constellations of materiality and ideology may bolster some calls for counterpublicity while gainsaying others. This may be investigated by examining how a text upholds or betrays an advocate's values, seeking out textual markers of access and influence that belie claims of marginalization, and assessing whethe…
A market for civil rights: Whiteness as property, colorblindness, and the rhetoric of school choice
In this essay, I focus on the advocacy of Betsy DeVos as a prominent exemplar of a larger trend among U.S. pro-market education advocates asserting school choice as a contemporary stage of the nation’s long struggle for civil rights. I argue that as DeVos championed her cause, she repurposed this right from a civil right seeking justice and equality to a property right serving privilege and the protection of whiteness as property. Engaging the fo…
Introduction: Neoliberalism and the public sphere
In contemporary scholarship, the term “neoliberalism” seemingly appears everywhere. Rather than seeking to develop a single definition that unifies these varied appearances, scholars in various disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary domains may develop critical conceptualizations that inform particular, active areas of inquiry. This special issue represents such an effort for rhetorical and communication scholarship on the public sphe…
Should Scholars Delineate a Data Set Apart from a Research Project? Considering Objects, Methods, and Purposes for Studying Presidential Rhetoric
Rather than identifying a data set prior to engaging in scholarship, we need to consider how scholars' choices of which presidential speeches to study depend importantly on their understanding of objects, methods, and purposes of analysis. Presidential speeches may be understood as discrete, meaningful texts and/or as parts of larger bodies of discourse. In either case, speech making may proceed in a moment that advocates and audiences alike appr…
Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy
Introduction| March 01 2010 Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy Robert Asen Robert Asen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955588 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Asen; Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2010; 13 (1): 1–5. doi: http…
Constructing the objects of our discourse: The welfare wars, the orphanage, and the silenced welfare mom
Recent welfare reform debates featured the return of the orphanage as a talked‐about policy initiative. This institution's sudden return presented a problem for both its supporters and its detractors. Both groups had to make sense of the orphanage as they argued for or against its efficacy. Through our discourse we resolve such problems, Michel Foucault explains, constructing the objects about which we speak. Several strategies were deployed to c…
Appreciation and desire: The male nude in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe
The representations of male bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe's nudes invite viewers to assume divergent and potentially contesting receptive stances. These different responses are enabled by the structural ambiguities of the photographs themselves. Mapplethorpe's male nudes appropriate past images and associations that evoke the canonical, classical genre of the nude as well as the artist's past work to present his models simultaneously as formal ob…
Seeking the "Counter," in Counterpublics
As conceptual models of the public sphere have moved toward multiplicity, “counterpublic” has emerged as a critical term to signify that some publics develop not simply as one among a constellation of discursive entities, but as explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that exclude the interests of potential participants. This essay attempts to forestall potential reductionism in future counterpublic theory by considering through 3 “o…
Nixon's Welfare Reform: Enacting Historical Contradictions of Poverty Discourses
This essay examines a 1969 speech by President Nixon that introduced Americans to his Family Assistance Plan, a welfare reform proposal that would have provided poor families with a minimum income guarantee. I argue that historical contradictions of poverty discourses informed Nixon's speech and frustrated his attempt to articulate a new approach to federal welfare policy.
Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (Rhetoric and Public Affairs)
Images shape the debate surrounding poverty. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally uncontroversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation completed a retrenchment era in welfare p…
A discourse theory of citizenship
This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenship recognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful, potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievable democratic practices…
Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia
As a conceptual term, "counterpublic" serves scholarship best when contributing to a critical-theory project, which means that particular constellations of materiality and ideology may bolster some calls for counterpublicity while gainsaying others. This may be investigated by examining how a text upholds or betrays an advocate's values, seeking out textual markers of access and influence that belie claims of marginalization, and assessing whethe…
Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life
Public modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life
Bringing together scholars in rhetorical, cultural, and media studies, this collection of new case studies illustrates a modalities approach to the study of publics. These case studies explore the implications of different ways of forming publics, including alternative means of expression, the intersection of politics and consumerism, and online engagement. In doing so, they raise important questions of access, community, and political efficacy.-…
Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy
This article situates public policy as a mediation of rhetorical and material forces. From this perspective, public policy draws on the constitutive and consequential power of rhetoric as well as other factors like institutional authority and financial resources. As a constellation of multifarious forces, public policy refigures the text as process, which raises issues of authorship, temporality, and polysemy differently than singular speech text…
Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy
Introduction| March 01 2010 Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy Robert Asen Robert Asen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955588 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Asen; Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2010; 13 (1): 1–5. doi: http…
Should Scholars Delineate a Data Set Apart from a Research Project? Considering Objects, Methods, and Purposes for Studying Presidential Rhetoric
Rather than identifying a data set prior to engaging in scholarship, we need to consider how scholars' choices of which presidential speeches to study depend importantly on their understanding of objects, methods, and purposes of analysis. Presidential speeches may be understood as discrete, meaningful texts and/or as parts of larger bodies of discourse. In either case, speech making may proceed in a moment that advocates and audiences alike appr…
Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush on Education Reform: Ascribing Agency and Responsibility through Key Policy Terms
This article explores Lyndon Baines Johnsons and George W. Bushs use of key policy terms to justify their education policies. President Johnson foregrounded the key policy term of "opportunity," whereas President Bush emphasized the term "accountability." Conveying a confident, forward-looking view of society opportunity charged the federal government with distributing educational resources among local communities. Replacing confidence with skept…
Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship
Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alterna…
Communication is the public
Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited: What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go Into the Field
As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the au…
The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy
Few forces have battered contemporary American politics as much as resentment. It may be only a small exaggeration to say that, at times, our politics have been driven by resentment. Harnessing res
Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good
This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordi…
Introduction: Neoliberalism and the public sphere
In contemporary scholarship, the term “neoliberalism” seemingly appears everywhere. Rather than seeking to develop a single definition that unifies these varied appearances, scholars in various disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary domains may develop critical conceptualizations that inform particular, active areas of inquiry. This special issue represents such an effort for rhetorical and communication scholarship on the public sphe…
Reconsidering symbolic use: A situational model of the use of research evidence in polarised legislative hearings
Participating in the growing scholarly attention to the roles of rhetoric and argumentation in policymaking, we examine how the use of research evidence operates in explicitly argumentative legislative hearings characterised by partisanship and polarisation. Conducting a rhetorical analysis of three legislative hearings in the US state of Wisconsin, we discovered that partisanship and polarisation did not influence argument and the use of researc…
Knowledge, Communication, and Anti-Critical Publicity: The Friedmans’ Market Public
Focusing on the writings of Milton and Rose Friedman, this article explicates a model of a market public as the normative mode of public engagement in a neoliberal regime of governance. The Friedmans’ market public narrowly construes conceptions of knowledge as arising from direct experience and communication as information exchange. Knowledge as direct experience supports the putative universality of self-interest and the sovereignty of individu…
Weaving intimacies: Grace and connection in scholarly community
This special forum was convened to honor the memory of Dr. Daniel C. Brouwer, who died in May 2021. Each contribution is coauthored to specifically honor his commitments to collaboration as a key form of scholarly inquiry, co-mentoring, ethical relationships, and community building. Each essay focuses on an aspect of Brouwer's scholarship, exploring topical, methodological, and theoretical interventions to generate insights and reflections for th…
A market for civil rights: Whiteness as property, colorblindness, and the rhetoric of school choice
In this essay, I focus on the advocacy of Betsy DeVos as a prominent exemplar of a larger trend among U.S. pro-market education advocates asserting school choice as a contemporary stage of the nation’s long struggle for civil rights. I argue that as DeVos championed her cause, she repurposed this right from a civil right seeking justice and equality to a property right serving privilege and the protection of whiteness as property. Engaging the fo…
Anti-Woke Publics
Futures for rhetoric and democracy
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Rhetoric (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)