«How Cultural Rhetorics Can Change the Conversation: Towards New Communication Spaces to Address Human Trafficking»

John T. Gagnon
«How Cultural Rhetorics Can Change the Conversation: Towards New Communication Spaces to Address Human Trafficking»
Poroi, vol. 12, n.º 2 (2017)

Poroi | The Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) | Obermann Center for Advanced Studies | Iowa | ESTADOS UNIDOS


Extracto de apartado en páginas 16-18 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«A Cultural Rhetorics Approach: New Communication Spaces

»I have shown by examples that top-down models used in antitrafficking discourse are severely prone to rhetorical slippage and selective representation, silencing the very voices most in need of being heard. We cannot begin, in my opinion, to have a real conversation about changes in human rights law and policy without first understanding how the discourses that brought current legal and policy structures into being play out in individual lives. To that end, through my work in and around the human trafficking issue, I advocate for a model that places cultural rhetorics as the centerpiece of human rights related rhetorical scholarship because it places individual lived experience at the center.

»Human trafficking stories, as we have seen, tend to be stories about others. In this sense, we might identify the core problem of anti-trafficking discourse imposing pre-defined assumptions onto lived experiences. Such discourse operates top-down rather than bottom-up by placing a framework around the issue of human trafficking first rather than constructing it from the stories that are told by those most involved and most impacted.

»An alternate approach, offered by cultural rhetorics, might more closely consider and account for the stories that individuals tell about themselves, the stories that survivors tell about their lived experiences in their own words, juxtaposing these with the stories that institutions put forward about human trafficking. What happens, for example, when we sit and listen to those who have lived through trafficking and then compare their stories, in all their nuance and humanity, to the dominant narrative?

»Instead of simplistic narrative flattening, and merely commodifying stories, we might offer up ways to support organizations to engage in relational accountability in interactions with survivors and their associated storytelling, helping individuals find and use their own voices. This is work that I am actively engaged in and model in my own research practices. I contend that the application of principles like emphases on storytelling and relationality would necessarily lead communities-of-interest to new models of practice by emphasizing grounded stories thereby shifting the basis for “truths” about the human trafficking phenomenon. This is work that has yet been done on a significant scale—and contributions from the scholarly community are sorely needed.

»In closing, I point to one non-scholarly, but relevant effort that has centered on survivor voices. I recall the experience that I had in 2015 while viewing Kay Chernush’s art exhibit Bought & Sold: Voices of Human Trafficking, which I saw on display at Michigan State University. The exhibit was comprised of twenty-six collaged and layered images, conveying a range of stories encompassing kidnapping, torture, physical mutilation, sexual exploitation, and indentured servitude.

»I was struck by the fact that the display seemed centered less on the art itself and more on the stories told by the survivors who inspired the art (each piece was accompanied by a word-for-word account from a human trafficking survivor). The emphasis on lived experience forced me to deeply consider those stories—the verbatim accounts of survivors—rather than the dominant narrative about human trafficking with which I’ve become so familiar. The exhibit was not merely an artistic display but rather an exercise in a new model of practice around this issue that re-centered the discussion on the voices and stories of survivors, survivor communities, and activism.

»Rather than reducing lived experiences into neat and tidy binaries—and rather than ensuring that each story adhered to the dominant narrative— each piece of the exhibit told a separate, unique story that honored the individual who lived it, emphasized that individual’s voice, and brought a multiplicity of exploitative experiences into a shared communal space. I share this, in conclusion, because it exemplifies precisely one model of the type of effort that I’m calling for in this article, an example of a project designed to shift the basis for conversation around human trafficking based on listening to stories at the ground level. Indeed, such stories “are alive and powerful, and we can be listening to, thinking about, and learning from” them (Lee, 2010, 111).

»In so doing, we might then be better able to evaluate how these stories interconnect and constellate not just with each other, but with a range of cultural influences.

»The application of a cultural rhetorics paradigm to this type of engagement proves essential, both for rhetoric scholars and human rights activists, because of its increased recognition of relationships: between self and others, between community members and communities, between materials and bodies, and between bodies and spaces. Importantly, it reflects the significance and impact of experiencing our work and our lives through human relationships rather than institutions and institutionally mediated stories about human rights issues.

»Such an emphasis on relationality requires significant time and energy for collaborative engagement, a recognition of intersubjectivity, and focus on listening as well as to building, fostering, and maintaining relationships.

»Effectively addressing the problems of rhetorical slippage and selective representation in discourse about human trafficking requires an attentiveness to how such stories develop and how those stories might come together to make meaning and build a “new language” that more fully recognizes not just the multiplicity of voices and values, but also the complexity, multidimensionality, and fluidity of human trafficking as a phenomenon. Simply put, this is an opportunity to rethink the stories we tell.

»By being accountable to and building relationships with those most impacted, we can collaboratively tell the stories that need to be heard, rather than the stories that merely serve institutional interests. With enough effort, thoughtfulness, and attentiveness we can, I think, engage in an “activity of hope” that seeks to tell different stories (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, 203) that both convey and embrace a multiplicity of subjectivities of multiply gendered and racialized bodies and other ‘others.’»