Stephen Hartnett's Presentation on Dealth Penalty Policy

The next meeting of the ICR's project on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on Friday, February 20, at 1:30 p.m. in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speaker will be Stephen J. Hartnett, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at UIUC. The title of his talk is: "Executing Democracy; or, How Americans Argue About the Death Penalty."

ABSTRACT Based on fourteen years teaching in, writing about, and protesting at America's prisons, Professor Hartnett has gathered a large set of documents illustrating the ways Americans talk about the death penalty in particular and the relationships among crime, violence, and democracy in general. Sifting through these documents suggests a series of over-riding argumentative typologies, literally the structural foundations for thought on the subject. Hartnett argues that one of the reasons various policy-oriented attempts to abolish the death penalty have failed--including the recent Illinois Report of the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment--is that they have not tapped into these deep typological structures, instead working in the dry language of legal reform. Merging policy initiatives, rhetorical criticism, and political activism, this presentation examines the complex dynamics of arguing about the death penalty.

Background Readings:

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 402-441
Rachel King, Don't Kill in Our Names, pp. 7-82

Stephen John Hartnett is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at The University of Illinois, where he is one of the University's 2003/2004 Helen Corley Petit Scholars of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a Research Fellow of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and an advisor to The Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society. He is the author of Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America, which won the National Communication Association's 2002 Winan's and Wicheln's Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address. He is co-author, with the late Robert James Branham, of Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America. Based on twelve years of teaching in, writing about, and protesting at prisons across America, he published Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror in 2003. His work as a rhetorical scholar of American history has appeared in American Studies, Argumentation and Advocacy, Boundary 2, Cultural Critique, Philosophy and Rhetoric, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, A Rhetorical History of the Unites States (volumes I and III, forthcoming), and Text and Performance Quarterly. His work as an activist, poet, and critic of the prison-industrial-complex has appeared in Broken Chains, The Common Review, Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies, Dark Night Field Notes, The Future of Performance Studies, The Journal of Applied Communication Research, The Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Left Curve, LIP, and The Radical Philosophy Review. He is currently working on two book projects, Executing Democracy: Arguing about The Death Penalty in America, 1683-1843, and The Empire of Deception: The War on Iraq, Globalization, & The Twilight of Democracy. He is married to Brett Kaplan, and lives in Champaign, Illinois.