Strategies of Moral Casting in Political Arenas: Actor Identifications as Assets in Political Persuasion

This timely collection develops concepts and refines research methods to better understand contemporary strategies in political persuasion. The book introduces an innovative analytical framework to explore dramaturgical rhetoric, applicable across various public arenas ranging from policy-making to current affairs media and activism. It features a set of empirical case studies on political discourse from six European countries (Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal, Russia) and draws on epistemic governance and cultural membership categorisation analysis to develop a new research field of ＂political poetics＂. The contributors to the volume deal with themes such as shifting evaluative scenes, interrelational identifications, temporal trajectories, and obliging moral address to provide new insights into moral casting. The book enhances critical literacy in political interaction and offers scholars and students alike with valuable new perspectives to grasp the relationship between rhetoric and democracy in the era of post-truth politics.

Hanna Rautajoki is Lecturer and the Head of Discipline in Sociology at Tampere University, Finland. Her research centers on strategic uses of identifications in social interaction. Rautajoki has extensive experience in interdisciplinary collaboration, covering topics from institutional interaction, political rhetoric, affective communication, narratives and membership categorization.

Richard Fitzgerald is Professor of Communication at the University of Macau, China (SAR). He has researched and written extensively on methods of qualitative discourse analysis with particular focus on Membership Categorisation Analysis.