In a recent piece co-authored with an advisee, we decided to not present effectiveness data in critiquing an intervention. The choice to not present the effectiveness data was a strategic choice situated in the critical impetus of CCA, based on the argument that the mainstream articulations of campaigns narrowly focus on effectiveness without attending to the dimensions of power, co-optation, and oppression that are often played out by the very same campaigns. Therefore, in our piece, we issued a call for the foregrounding of alternative criteria that question the very paradigm of effectiveness, the ways in which it is measured and reported etc. In one of our reviewers, a reviewer insisted that this was an unethical choice because the manuscript did not present the evidence that was available. What intrigues me about this argument made by the reviewer is how situated amidst ideology this specific evaluation of ethics is. Why is it that discussions of oppressive ideologies perpetrated by campaigns in not required by mainstream capaign theorists by the same token? Is that not an unethical choice? Why is it that the silencing of alternative articulations by name calling them as unethical is not thought of an unethical choice? Why is it that the holier than thou calls for ethics are so often situated amidst the agendas, goals, and privileges of the Euro-centric knowledge producing structure?
In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...