Conference Description

    "Violence," Raymond Williams says, "is often now a difficult word," due to its "emotional power" and due to its application. It is not so much the "physical assault" that defines violence; rather, it "seems to be specialized to unauthorized uses: the violence of a terrorist but not, except by its opponents, of an army, where force is preferred." Violence violates communal order and the fabric of a people's lives. We do not commune with those who visit depredations on us; paradoxically, however, those acts, as we have seen of late, can serve to draw the community together. Violence rends the community, taking from it those for who we care and, yet, in the presence of violence, those remaining draw together as one.
 
    This conference seeks to examine such processes, past and present. Although the events of September 11, 2001 have partly inspired this theme and will be addressed in several presentations, we also will explore this theme in a variety of ways, as the program indicates. Presentations will explore violence and community in contexts ranging from 19th century discourses surrounding  slavery, reconstruction and transgenderism to twentieth century discourses surrounding lynching, immigration, environmental disputes, and the death penalty. Treating violence as both a material and discursive phenomenon, we want to critique the ways in which rhetoric constitutes the various dialectics between violence and community. How does violence itself function as a persuasive act?  Terrorism, as many have suggested, requires not only a perpetrator and a victim, but also an audience,  the community the terrorist wishes to damage and to influence. Similarly, the discursive frames set around violence, the symbolic means through which we define it, understand it, and evaluate it, from Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston "Massacre" to a president's characterization of acts of war, deserve careful scrutiny. Violence and community, as Williams and others suggest, are also critical in the constitution of identity, in the creation of a "people" who draw together and come apart during critical moments in national history.
 
    Special thanks to the University of Georgia Center for Humanities and Arts, which partially funded this conference through a Conference Grant, and to our colleagues and graduate students in the Department of Speech Communication for their support.

Bonnie J. Dow, John M. Murphy, Celeste M. Condit, and Kevin M. Deluca
Conference Planners