Witnessing Rhetoric of the International Solidarity Movement
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, SUBJECTIVITY, AND SOLIDARITY: WITNESSING RHETORIC OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT Emily Brook Wachsmann , B. A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2009 APPROVED: Brian A. Lain, Major Professor Shaun R. Treat, Committee Member Karen Anderson, Committee Member Nada Shabout, Committee Member Alicia Re Cruz, Committee Member John M. Allison, Jr. Chair of the Department of Communication Studies Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Wachsmann, Emily Brook. Social Movements, Subjectivity, and Solidarity: Witnessing Rhetoric of the International Solidarity Movement. Master of Arts (Communication Studies), August 2009, 137 pp., references, 84 titles. This study engaged in pushing the current political limitations created by the political impasse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by imagining new possibilities for radical political change, agency, and subjectivity for both the international activists volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement as well as Palestinians enduring the brutality of life under occupation. The role of the witness and testimony is brought to bear on activism and rhetoric the social movement ISM in Palestine. Approaches the past studies of the rhetoric of social movements arguing that rhetorical studies often disassociated ‘social’ from social movements, rendering invisible questions of the social and subjectivity from their frames for evaluation. Using the testimonies of these witnesses, Palestinians and activists, as the rhetorical production of the social movement, this study provides an effort to put the social body back into rhetorical studies of social movements. The relationships of subjectivity and desubjectification, as well as, possession of subjects by agency and the role of the witness with each of these is discussed in terms of Palestinian and activist potential for subjectification and desubjectifiation.
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