To speak is to say something, to someone: it is to claim or express a fact or feeling about the world, as well as to presume or articulate – to perform – some aspect of a relationship between whoever speaks and whoever listens […]
Haskell Wexler’s film The Bus (1965) shows a mixed group travelling from San Francisco to Washington to join the March for Jobs and Freedom in August, 1963. It builds the sense of a journey, one which is social and spiritual as well as political, of joining the country through its successive stops along the way. Its action is talk […]
Ordinary, everyday talk is conversational, two-way or three-way or more, something like bagatelle as it bounces around within a group. It is fuelled by uncertainty: nobody quite knows who might speak next, or when […]
The interview changes the dynamics of political talk. It is mediated, most obviously in the sense that is broadcast on tv or radio or both, but just as importantly in that it is conducted by an interviewer on behalf of an audience […]
Some forms of speech are forms of collective action. A demonstration, for example, makes its demands insistently, repeatedly and collectively, in the form of a chant […]