Public Futures: The Rhetorics of Sustainability and Survival in Philadelphia, 2007 - 2021
Restricted (Penn State Only)
Author:
Schneider, Haley Elizabeth
Graduate Program:
Communication Arts and Sciences
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
June 02, 2022
Committee Members:
Rosa Eberly, Chair & Dissertation Advisor Amy Allen, Outside Unit & Field Member Bradford Vivian, Major Field Member Stephen Browne, Major Field Member Andrew High, Program Head/Chair Joshua Barnett, Major Field Member
In this dissertation, I propose the concept of public futures as a critical framework for studying how the idea of the future is invoked in public deliberation. I define public futures as the processes through which a community collectively imagines its shared future. Through an analysis of four environmental initiatives in Philadelphia, I describe how members of Philadelphia’s public articulated shared futures and persuaded others to take action on the basis of a particular future. I argue that public futures help maintain a sense of collective identity in the face of crisis by negotiating the terms of continuity and change. Public futures enable members of a public to deliberate about how a group must transform to survive and adapt, as well as what features remain essential to group identity. When the survival of a public is threatened, members of a public turn to public futures to persuade constituents that their group is worth fighting for, while individual members of a public might invoke the idea of the future to advocate for their own survival within a larger group. Through this process, public futures reveal rhetoric itself as an act of survival.
