Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship

Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jurgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alternatives to the established order. I then explicate how rhetorical scholars have deployed counterpublic theory to produce critical analyses of the dynamics of multiple publics, inclusion-exclusion, and equality-inequality. Looking forward to future scholarship, I issue a methodological call for fieldwork as a complement to textual analysis as well as explorations of locally and transnationally situated publics.