Victoria Ledford and I just published “The Instagram activism slideshow: Translating policy argumentation skills to digital civic participation” as an original teaching idea in Communication Teacher.

The Instagram Activism Slideshow helps undergraduate students bridge theory and practice by connecting the media arguments they see in their daily lives to the principles of policy argument they learn in argumentation courses. Students use a relevant argumentation theory or concept to argue for a public policy in a concise and palatable Instagram “slideshow” format. The Instagram Activism Slideshow engages students with a highly relevant media context, equips students with a meaningful product for their professional portfolios, and teaches students how to leverage argumentation for advocacy.Courses This assignment is suitable to relevant upper-division undergraduate communication courses related to argumentation, social and digital media messaging, civic participation, social justice, and public policy. Relevant courses might include argumentation and debate, argumentation and advocacy, argumentation and public policy, and social media campaigns.Objectives The purpose of this assignment is to assist students in: (1) understanding how stock issues arguments apply to public policy rhetoric; (2) effectively planning, creating, and presenting multimedia arguments; and (3) analyzing and evaluating public policy arguments.

Victoria Ledford and Matthew Salzano, “The Instagram Activism Slideshow: Translating Policy Argumentation Skills to Digital Civic Participation,” Communication Teacher (January 19, 2022): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2021.2024865.

This project builds from my previous work on Instagram Slideshows that serves as a chapter in my dissertation. Also still forthcoming from this line of research is a publicly-accessible digital archive (currently in Beta testing) that hopes to support scholars, educators, and activists who want to browse a collection of slideshows for education, criticism, and/or inspiration.

If you’d like a PDF of the article, please email me! Also check out the Twitter thread Victoria wrote about the article.

Out online-first in Critical Studies in Media Communication: “Going off scripts: emotional labor and technoliberal managerialism,” co-authored with Misti Yang.

Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification, control, tracking, and optimization capacities of technology to manage everyday interactions. Through the analysis of viral self-help Twitter threads, a mobile application, and an algorithmic prototype we trace how the resulting habituation rewards happiness, efficiency, and uniformity at the expense of moodiness, messiness, and difference. Ultimately, we argue that going off scripts and embracing the “fuck up” can help resist technoliberalism.

You can read the entire essay at CSMC, or email me (mattsalzano AT gmail DOT com) to get a PDF.

I also wrote up a twitter thread about the essay if you’re interested in a more casual summary of our insights.

My paper, “Technoliberal Participation: Black Lives Matter and Instagram Slideshows” was just published in AoIR’s Selected Papers of Internet Research archive.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests surged around the globe. Amid COVID-19, activism on social media flourished. On Instagram, use of the ten-image carousel as an informative slideshow akin to a PowerPoint presentation gained significant attention: The New York Times highlighted their “effort to democratize access to information.” In this paper, I rhetorically analyze case studies to illustrate how Instagram slideshows facilitated deliberation about participation. I argue that these posts reveal a tension in platformed digital activism: as digital templates broaden access to participation, technoliberal ideology constrains activist judgment.

Salzano, Matthew. 2021. “Technoliberal participation: Black Lives Matter and Instagram Slideshows.” Association of Internet Researchers Selected Papers in Internet Research.  

This project is ongoing. In Communication Teacher, Victoria Ledford and I offer a pedagogical guide to Instagram Activism Slideshows for college educators. In a dissertation chapter, I look closely at a media history of slideshows–how did they arrive on Instagram, and what rhetorical features did they bring with them? This chapter is connected to a digital archive (currently in Beta testing) that hopes to support scholars, educators, and activists who want to browse a collection of slideshows for education, criticism, and/or inspiration.

I look forward to sharing more, and please reach out if you’re interested in chatting more about Instagram activism via slideshows.

The first article co-authored by the Critical Communication Pedagogy Research Team, facilitated by the Oral Communication Program in UMD’s Department of Communication, was just published in Communication Teacher.

Ashby-King, Drew, Victoria Ledford, Jeannette Iannacone, Alyson Farzad-Phillips, Matthew Salzano and Lindsey Anderson. 2021. “Expanding and constraining critical communication pedagogy in the introductory communication course: A critique of assessment rubrics.” Communication Teacher.

Rubrics are a commonly used tool to evaluate student work in the introductory communication course. Although rubrics may appear objective, they are continually interpreted by both instructors and students, often reflecting traditional classroom power dynamics. In order to understand how rubrics constrain as well as expand opportunities for the enactment of critical communication pedagogy, we conducted an interpretive analysis of the presentational speaking rubrics used in the introductory communication course at 20 institutions in the United States. In doing so, we identified three levels of rubric context: high, low, and shared. These contexts inform important theoretical and pedagogical implications for the introductory course, as they highlight existing power dynamics, instructor grading practices, and student agency.

This essay was written with colleagues spanning all three tracks in UMD COMM: Rhetoric (Farzad-Phillips and Salzano), PR (Ashby-King and Iannacone), and Communication Science (Ledford).

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

My review of Dr. Casey Boyle’s book, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, was just published online-first in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Here is the first paragraph of the review:

Through examples as varied as glitch art, urbexer photography, and DIY digital networks, Casey Boyle suggests a redefinition of rhetoric, one summarized in the title of his book: Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice. “Practice,” like rhetoric, has many definitions; rhetoric is both a social practice and something that individuals practice. But this is not a rhetoric handbook in a posthuman register. Boyle’s project is not simply offering “posthuman methods” that rhetors can use to increase their persuasiveness. Instead, he is attending to the rhetorical consequences of contemporary digital information technology by transcending a humanist framework and theorizing that rhetoric “is a practice that exercises serial encounters within ecologies to inform bodies” (27). Boyle draws from scholarship on rhetorical ecologies and circulation, critical affect studies, and posthumanism to recast well-worn, ancient practices from rhetorical training as ways to exercise rhetorical capacities. Boyle’s work is thus relevant to seemingly disparate subfields of rhetoric and communication studies: rhetoricians engaged with in situ field methods may find his discussions of topoi complementary and provocative, scholars of historic public address may contend with his implication that persuasion is a result of serial encounters, and teachers of public speaking might consider whether assigning self-reflection papers about persuasive speeches is an adequate way to prepare students for contemporary civic life.

You can read the entire review at the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Contact me if you don’t have access to QJS and would like a PDF.