Scholarship: Local Theories of Argument

Edited by Dale Hample, Local Theories of Argument is a selected collection of essays originally presented at the 2019 Alta Conference on Argumentation.

I’m the author of chapter six: “Beyond Participation, Toward Disparticipation: Contesting White Feminism at the 2017 Women’s March.” It appears you can read that on Google Books.

In this paper, I supplement the analog of movement to view the richness of activist argumentation, specifically revealing what I call “disparticipation.” While disparticipators may be seen as not participating, or even counter- protesting, their arguments are really dissing a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Building from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s ( 1999) theory in Disidentifications, I contend that disparticipation is the action of someone who takes part in an assembly queerly by defying global understandings of social movement. Disparticipation generates argumentation that expands the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices.

Salzano, 2021, p. 38-39.

I also co-authored chapter 62: “The Bensenville Pause: Argumentation, Sound Figuration, and Local Sound Cultures” with Justin Eckstein.

“Noise” is part and parcel of any pluralist democracy where different cultures must come together and occupy the same space. Hence, one of the most vexed objects is what exactly constitutes a noise and how communities use reason to determine noise regulations. This essay extends the work done in rhetoric, sound, and argumentation by suggesting a local theory of sound argumentation: there is not a universal sound to measure against noise, but only local sound cultures rhetorically constituting vibration into meaning. In other words, there can only be local theories of sound arguments. We argue that this is best illustrated through controversies around what constitutes a noise in the first place and how sound is marshalled to make arguments in these controversies.

Salzano and Eckstein, 2021, p. 419

Happy to provide PDFs via email! mattsalzano [AT] gmail [dot] com