Counter-Narrative: How Progressive Academics Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice

by Goodall Jr,H.L.

• ISBN13: 9781598745634
• ISBN10: 1598745638
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2010-10-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Goodall portrays a world caught up in the middle of a narrative arms race, where the message of the political right has outflanked the message of the political left. It is a world where narratives used by the far right inch ever closer to those employed by right-wing extremists in the Muslim world. Rather than dismiss the use of political narratives as a shallow tactic of the opposition, Goodall promotes their usefulness and outlines a number of ways that liberal academics can retake the public discourse from the extremist opposition. This is an essential text for the aspiring public intellectual and will appeal to students and scholars of qualitative methods, communications and media, and political science alike.

Author Biography

H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. is Professor of Communication and former Director of the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author or co-author of twenty books and a pioneer in the field of narrative ethnography.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 7
Introduction: Before We Begin…	p. 19
The Battle of Narratives	p. 27
Binary Opposites and Narrative IEDs	p. 45
Our War of Ideas Is a War Fought with Words and Humor
Birthers, Social Justice & the Texas Textbook Massacre	p. 67
The Nature of Paranoid Style, Conspiracies, and the Ruse Narrative in Extremist Discourse
Left at the War	p. 89
The Battle of Narratives on Two Fronts: the Global War on Terror and the Right-Wing War on Obama's America
The Academic Dilemma	p. 117
Higher Education as a Battleground in the War of Ideas
Learning from Obama and Learning from Our Enemies	p. 137
Steps toward a Progressive Core Narrative and Communication for the Common Good
The Core Counter-Narrative	p. 157
Notes	p. 171
References	p. 185
Index	p. 194
About the Author	p. 207
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