“Completely impartial opinion, okay?”

Sponsorships on YouTube – i.e., video creators on YouTube promoting a third-party product or service to their audience – have attracted considerable research interest recently in various disciplines. This multidisciplinary study analyzes it from the perspective of argumentation theory, specifically pragma-dialectics, which offers valuable new insights into the discursive tensions inherent to this type of promotion. These tensions arise between the creator’s relationship with their audience on the one hand, which is built upon ‘parasocial’ evaluations of authenticity and community, and the commercial third party brand on the other. The insights provided by the pragma-dialectic analysis are demonstrated by means of a case study examining a sponsorship segment by YouTuber PewDiePie, which shows that creators can employ specific types of presentational choices and audience adaptation strategically to undercut commitment to the sponsor while furthering the relationship with their viewers.

Sex Work and Professional Risk Communication: Keeping Safe on the Streets

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

Promoting Oral Presentation Skills Through Drama-Based Tasks with an Authentic Audience: A Longitudinal Study

Drama activities are reported to foster language learning, and may prepare learners for oral skills that mirror those used in real life. This year-long time series classroom-based quasi-experimental study followed a between-subjects design in which two classes of college EFL learners were exposed to two oral training conditions: (1) an experimental one in which drama-based training pedagogy was employed; and (2) the comparison one in which ordinary public speaking pedagogy was utilized. The experimental participants dramatized a picture book into a play, refined and rehearsed it for the classroom audience, and eventually performed it publicly as a theater production for community children. Diachronic comparisons of the participants’ oral presentation skills under the two conditions showed that a significant between-group difference began to become pronounced only after the experimental participants started to present for real-life audiences other than their classmates. This finding suggests that drama-mediated pedagogy effectively enhanced the experimental participants’ presentation performance and became more effective than the traditional approach only after a real-life audience was involved. In addition to the participants’ performance data, survey and retrospective protocols were utilized to shed light on how drama-based tasks targeting both classroom and authentic audiences influence college EFL learners’ presentation performance and their self-perceived oral presentation skills. Analysis of the survey and retrospective data indicated that the participants’ attention to three presentation skills—structure, audience adaptation and content—was significantly raised after their presentation involved a real-life audience. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications for drama for FL oral presentation instruction are discussed.

Empathy as an essential skill for talent development consultants

Purpose This study aims to present empathy as an ideal characteristic of consultants for talent development (CTD). It provides a contextualized look at how empathy manifests in CTD practice and offers practical guidance for improving CTD empathy skills, and thus their performance in the corporate classroom. Design/methodology/approach In total, 34 interviews with talent development professionals were analyzed using a qualitative coding process. Findings Apart from functional and industry knowledge, a collection of soft skill themes emerged from the analysis, including active listening, perspective taking, audience adaptation and communication style. These themes coalesced around the construct of empathy and provided a framework with which to understand how empathy is expressed and leveraged in talent development consulting. Originality/value While business research has explored the importance of empathy in some workplaces, to the knowledge, this is the first study focusing on the empathy of CTDs. In addition, literature paints a fractured and anecdotal picture of soft skills for the ideal consultant. This research helps CTDs, those who hire them and business educators target essential skills for facilitating workplace learning.

Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969)

Engaging with adaptation theory and narrative theory, and relevant contemporaneous critical reviews, this essay textually analyses Newman’s original novel and its television adaptations and considers these in relation to audience reception, as well as to other similarly placed literary adaptations. In analysing the repression of incestuous desire, and the sado-masochistic themes that arise in A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, this chapter also refers to Freudian psychoanalysis, connecting the themes of incestuous desire, and associated guilt-induced masochism to narrative theory in the way that these dual fantasies propel the narrative forward. Finally, this essay comments upon incest as taboo in interpreting audience reception.

Text, Image, Audience: Adaptation and Reception of Andrea Newman'sBouquet of Barbed Wire

Andrea Newman's 1969 novel, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, has been adapted twice for television: first in 1976, and later in 2010. Controversially, the novel and its adaptations inferred father – daughter incest, a subject that was considered taboo during the 1970s. Arguably, though partly arising as a result of available technologies at that time, the repressed nature of incest is reflected in the claustrophobic aesthetics of the 1976 television version. In contrast, the more diverse cinematography, panoramic settings and less populated frames of Ashley Pearce's 2010 version correspond with an increasingly transparent approach to incest and child abuse, consistent with the contemporary zeitgeist, which fosters openness across all social and cultural structures. In particular, the changed climate involves a mounting preoccupation with, and sensitivity to, child welfare and legislation, arising as a result of national and international media revelations of child abuse in both domestic and institutional scenarios. Engaging theoretically with Raymond Williams’ concept of a ‘structure of feeling’, as well as referring to Freud's seduction theory, and television theorists including Karen Lury and John Ellis, this article locates parallels between the way that incest is represented and the socio-political and cultural contexts of the respective television adaptations of Newman's novel.

Twenty-fourth Annual Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture: Erasmus’ Contribution to Rhetoric and Rhetoric in Erasmus’ Writing

This paper claims that Erasmus was the most important and influential theorist of rhetoric in the Renaissance and that Erasmus’ thinking is heavily influenced by rhetoric. After showing that Erasmus wrote the most successful rhetoric textbooks of the sixteenth century and that he ontinued to compose and revise rhetoric books from the 1490s right up to his death in 1536, the paper argues that rhetorical ideas condition Erasmus’ way of thinking and arguing about editing, commentary, and religious teaching. Then the paper analyses in more detail Erasmus’ contribution as a theorist of rhetoric in the areas of: rhetoric and reading, the audience, adaptation of the three genres of classical rhetoric, invention, proverbs, descriptions, comparisons, style, imitation, emotion, and decorum. Finally the paper argues that Erasmus the writer made use of his rhetorical theories but also went beyond the prescriptions of the textbook, discussing the Adages and the Praise of Folly. Erasmus develops the deeply playful originality of his work from the rhetorical principles of declamation, topical invention, irony, ethos, and decorum.