| Description |
Water is a site of resistance. In late modernity, water wars have become increasingly prevalent across the globe. The locus for this case study of rhetorical strategies in internal coalition communication is an environmental campaign to prevent a proposed water project in the US West that threatens the sustainability of numerous watersheds in the region. The researcher examines internal coalition communication to develop knowledge about the rhetorical strategies for negotiating discursive difference and cultural tensions among participants. These strategies are important to coalition maintenance, which supports coalition health, durability and the capacity to effect change within social systems. Given climate change and sustainability issues in late modernity, the rhetorical strategies of coalitions that are organized to mitigate related problems are important. The author constructs a theoretical framework with democratic, conflict and rhetorical theory to conceptualize internal coalition rhetoric because participation, conflict, persuasion, and deliberation are fundamental aspects of coalition maintenance. Rhetorical criticism and qualitative field methods are used as a mixed methodological approach to develop understanding about internal coalition rhetoric. To collect live rhetorics, the author does participant observation of coalition strategy meetings spanning several years and semistructured interviews with active coalition participants. Through analysis of field notes and interviews the author discovers the comic frame as a master frame for internal coalition maintenance because it promotes unifying yet critical ways to iv address internal difference. Within a comic frame, process literacy (which pivots communication toward a collaborative communicative genre) and four types of humor are identified as rhetorical strategies for negotiating discursive and cultural difference. Additionally, findings indicate that humor at the expense of others can operate within both comic and melodramatic frames in particular kairotic moments without disrupting the master comic frame. The author encourages more research on: (1) rhetorical strategies of both internal and external coalition communication as a means for developing social movement and deliberative democracy theory (particularly where water is a site of resistance); (2) the interplay between comic and melodramatic frames in both internal and external coalition communication contexts; and (3) identity vulnerability within a comic frame. |
