Deliberative Acts

Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights

Arabella Lyon

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780271059747
• eBook ISBN:
  9780271062228
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Deliberation in the Global Era
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: The Beauty of Arendt’s Lies: Menchú’s Political Strategy
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference in Kind
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• COVER Back