The Department of Communication Studies will host Heather Suzanne Woods, Kansas State, and Leslie Hahner, Baylor University, to present their recently published book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right on October 3rd, at 3:30pm in the Ubuntu Room of the Jackie Gaughan Multicultural Center. A book sale and signing will follow the lecture.
Using the 2016 election as a case study, Woods and Hahner will detail how the far right used memetic persuasion. They attend to the rhetorical principles used to design Alt-right memes, outlining the various ways memes lure mainstream audiences to a number of extremist claims. Ultimately, they will argue that Alt-right memes influence digital culture and the ways publics form by directing discourse from the margins to the center and back again.
Heather Suzanne Woods is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technology at Kansas State University. Her research centers on rhetorics of futurity and innovation. She is published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Present Tense, and Teaching Media Quarterly.
Leslie A. Hahner is an Associate Professor of Communication at Baylor University. Her work explores how the visual shapes public culture. She is the award-winning author of To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century. Her work appears in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and other outlets.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Center for Digital Humanities, and Convocations Committee. For more information about this lecture, please contact Casey Kelly at ckelly11@unl.edu.
