Professor Stuart Murray has published new articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and The Conversation
Dr. Stuart Murray has published new articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and in The Conversation.
Empathy as Bug: The Rhetoric of MAGA’s “Battle” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly:
This essay critiques the rhetorical displacement of empathy by sympathy in contemporary political discourse, especially within digital media ecologies dominated by memes, grievance, and identitarian performativity. Beginning with Elon Musk’s claim that empathy is “civilizational suicide,” the essay traces how sympathetic identification—rooted in sameness and affective fusion—has supplanted empathy’s difficult labor of encountering difference. Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect studies, and close readings of memes, the essay analyzes how contemporary rhetorics (including on the Left) impede the slow, uncertain, and unsentimental work that empathy requires. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and theories of rhetorical empathy, the essay reframes empathy not as moral sentiment but as agonistic hearkening—a practice of nonidentical attunement amid algorithmic closure. Ultimately, it calls for rhetorical scholars to reclaim empathy as a counter-rhetorical and ontological necessity in the face of post-truth tribalism.
From ‘God Emperor Trump’ to ‘St. Luigi,’ memes power the politics of feeling in The Conversation:
A meme is a decontextualized video or image — often captioned — that circulates an idea, behaviour or style, primarily through social media. As they spread, memes are adapted, remixed and transformed, helping to solidify the communities around them.
Why do images of Donald Trump as a galactic emperor or Luigi Mangione as a Catholic saint resonate so deeply with some people? Memes don’t just entertain — they shape how we identify with power, grievance and justice in the digital age.