WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture on Crisis, Conflict, and Communication Ethics by Prof. Ronald C. Arnett from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The lecture will take place on March 15, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. in room C1, Collegium Novum.
Crisis, Conflict and Communication Ethics
by
Prof. Ronald C. Arnett
Thursday, March 15, 6:30 p.m.,
room C1, Collegium Novum
Signification of human meaning dwells in ethics and culture, finding expression in and through rhetorical practices. Ethics and culture consist of practices that gather the meaningful and the important together, yielding urgency for rhetorical employment of those practices. The union of ethics, culture, and rhetoric offers a coherent dwelling for the protection and promotion of the consequential. Ethics and culture are practices of meaningfulness that compel rhetorical expression, announcing a stance attentive to the important, reminding self and informing other of a particular account of the meaningful. Ethics and culture adjudicate a sense of ground that nourishes rhetorical understanding and engagement with the world. Rhetoric explicates practices of consequence that reflect the performative dwelling of ethics and culture, retelling self and other about the imperative. Rhetoric permits self and other to interrogate a ground of distinctive practices that structure the noteworthy. Rhetoric facilitates discovery, testing, and knowledgeable implementation. It moves ethics and culture from points of abstraction to knowing public coordinates in a communicative social world impactful on self and others. This essay surveys the interplay of ethics, rhetoric, and culture in their tri-construction and enactment of practices that engender human meaning. Rhetoric thrusts distinctive versions of ethics and culture into the public domain—such action renders practical awareness of the existence of contrasting rhetorical content. Acknowledging difference exposes and probes practices of public consequence that undergird unique ethical and cultural stances.
Ronald C. Arnett (Ph.D., Ohio University, 1978) is chair and professor of the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies, The Patricia Doherty Yoder and Ronald Wolfe Endowed Chair in Communication Ethics at Duquesne University, and the Henry Koren, C.S.Sp., Endowed Chair for Scholarly Excellence (2010–2015). He is the author/coauthor of eleven books and co-editor of four books. His most recent books are Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics (2017, Southern Illinois University Press) and Corporate Communication Crisis Leadership: Ethics and Advocacy (2017, Business Expert Press). He is the recipient of eight book awards, including the 2017 Top Book award from the National Communication Association’s Communication Ethics Division and 2017 Distinguished Book award from National Communication Association’s Philosophy of Communication Division for his book Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics and the 2013 Top Book Award for Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope from the Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association. In 2017, he was named Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association. He is the recipient of the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship from Duquesne University and is the recipient of the 2005 Scholar of the Year Award from the Religious Communication Association. Dr. Arnett was named both Centennial Scholar of Communication and Centennial Scholar of Philosophy of Communication by the Eastern Communication Association in 2009. Dr. Arnett is currently serving his third editorship for the Journal of Communication and Religion and is the former editor of the Review of Communication. He is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Communication Association and former Executive Director of the Eastern Communication Association.
