Contrasting Arguments: The Culture War and The Clash in Education is a small study that presents the variable story of the culture wars and the clash in education from the point of view of the principle actors on the two sides

Argumentation is often understood as a coherent set of Western theories, birthed in Athens and developing throughout the Roman period, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and into the present century. Ideas have been nuanced, developed, and revised, but still the outline of argumentation theory has been recognizable for centuries, or so it has seemed to Western scholars. The 2019 Alta Conference on Argumentation (co-sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensic Association) aimed to question the generality of these intellectual traditions. This resulting collection of essays deals with the possibility of having local theories of argument – local to a particular time, a particular kind of issue, a particular place, or a particular culture. Many of the papers argue for reconsidering basic ideas about arguing to represent the uniqueness of some moment or location of discourse. Other scholars are more comfortable with the Western traditions, and find them congenial to the analysis of arguments that originate in discernibly distinct circumstances. The papers represent different methodologies, cover the experiences of different nations at different times, examine varying sorts of argumentative events (speeches, court decisions, food choices, and sound), explore particular personal identities and the issues highlighted by them, and have different overall orientations to doing argumentation scholarship. Considered together, the essays do not generate one simple conclusion, but they stimulate reflection about the particularity or generality of the experience of arguing, and therefore the scope of our theories.

This edited volume represents the best of the scholarship presented at the 18th National Communication Association/American Forensic Association Conference on Argumentation. This biennial conference brings together a lively group of argumentation scholars from a range of disciplinary approaches and a variety of countries. Disturbing Argument contains selected works that speak both to the disturbing prevalence of violence in the contemporary world and to the potential of argument itself, to disturb the very relations of power that enable that violence. Scholars’ essays analyze a range of argument forms, including body and visual argument, interpersonal and group argument, argument in electoral politics, public argument, argument in social protest, scientific and technical argument, and argument and debate pedagogy. Contributors study argument using a range of methodological approaches, from social scientifically informed studies of interpersonal, group, and political argument to humanistic examinations of argument theory, political discourse, and social protest, to creatively informed considerations of argument practices that truly disturb the boundaries of what we consider argument.

This book focuses on how new pedagogical scenarios, task environments and communication tools within Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments can favour collaborative and productive confrontations of ideas, evidence, arguments and explanations, or arguing to learn. The first to assemble the work of internationally renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers in education, psychology, computer science, communication and linguistic studies

Many Sides is the first full-length study of Protagorean antilogic, an argumentative practice with deep roots in rhetorical history and renewed relevance for contemporary culture. Founded on the philosophical relativism of Protagoras, antilogic is a dynamic rather than a formal approach to argument, focused principally on the dialogical interaction of opposing positions (anti-logoi) in controversy. In ancient Athens, antilogic was the cardinal feature of Sophistic rhetoric. In Rome, Cicero redefined Sophistic argument in a concrete set of dialogical procedures. In turn, Quintilian inherited this dialogical tradition and made it the centrepiece of his own rhetorical practice and pedagogy. Many Sides explores the history, theory, and pedagogy of this neglected rhetorical tradition and, by appeal to recent rhetorical and philosophical theory, reconceives the enduring features of antilogical practice in a dialogical approach to argumentation especially suited to the pluralism of our own age and the diversity of modern classrooms.

Based on empirical studies of European energy and environmental policies, this book suggests that, in combination, these two policy fields form a consensus in the EU which might also become the basis for a new European ideology, namely European ‘sustainabilism’. It asks why an environmental conscience has grown since the late 1960s in the industrialised world and shows that whilst there is undeniable environmental degradation during this time, and that a European environmental conscience has mainly developed through successive steps of European integration in energy policy. In this connection between energy and the environmental we find one driver for European integration and indeed European identity. If sustainabilism should become a European ideology, it will substantially influence the way future Europeans will live. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, International Relations, Political Science, History, Economics, Sustainability Studies, Environmental and Energy Policies in Europe.