Acknowledgements

Thank you to my partners in the conversations that became the soil out of which this book grew. Of these, most important have been my students. At the University of North Dakota, where I started my career, I began developing these ideas in Comm 405: Social Implications of an Information Society, and Comm 501: Theoretical Perspectives in Communication. At the University of Ottawa, where I have taught for the past five years, I developed them in CMN 3109: Advanced Theories of Communication, CMN 5132: Theories and Effects of the Media, and CMN 8111: Theories in Media Studies. I am especially indebted to the students in CMN 3109 during the Winter and Spring/Summer 2018 terms and in CMN 5132 and CMN 8111 during the Fall 2018 term, who read and engaged with drafts of different chapters. I am also grateful to the doctoral students at the Universität Trier for their perceptive engagement when I delivered talks based on chapters 2 and 3 as part of the university’s IRTG: Diversity program in July 2019.

Going back further, I want to thank my teachers who prized rigour, clarity, and, above all, θαυμάζειν, or thaumazein, the sense of astonishment (according to Aristotle) out of which philosophy springs. They include my grade 5 teacher, Mrs. Sprague, Timberwilde Elementary; Mrs. Lorenzetti, my English teacher in grade 8 at Baker Junior High School; Mr. Kornegay, who taught me calculus in grade 11 at Albuquerque High School; and Ms. Parris, my grade 12 English teacher at Albuquerque High School. They also include two of my professors at the University of North Dakota, Kathleen Dixon and Michael Beard, both in the Department of English. Others have been teachers in practice, if not in title, including Brent Christianson, in Madison, Wisconsin, and Erin Burns, in Ottawa. And some are simply my friends, in particular Sam Rocha.

In a narrower sense, I owe a professional debt to Elizabeth Galewski, Joshua Young, and Brett Ommen. If I know anything about rhetorical invention, it is because of them. (But if I can’t get my facts straight, that’s on me.) Liz, with whom I had coffee once a week when we were students at the University of Wisconsin, taught me about tropological invention and the pleasures of irony. Josh, whose doctoral work I had the privilege of supervising in its final stages, taught me to look for invention in unexpected places. And Brett—he was my colleague and friend at the University of North Dakota. We have since gone our separate ways, but one thing (among many) he showed me was that we can pick and choose what we need from the tools of theory to solve the problem at hand. His approach to theory was endlessly inventive.

In a more immediate sense, I want to thank Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, now at the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and Craig Walker, at Queen’s University. In 2016, Enrique invited me to give the keynote address at a conference on cultural transduction (his term for cultural translation, more or less). That talk became chapter 1 of this book. But the other chapters came from the page of notes I jotted down while listening to Craig’s presentation on Petr Pavlenskii. He is no doubt unaware of the way his talk struck me, not only for what he was saying but for what he was doing: he made me walk around a concept I thought I knew well (cultural translation) and see it from a new angle.

I also want to thank everyone at Athabasca University Press, especially Pamela Holway. This is an odd book—no two ways around it!—and she was its strongest supporter from the moment I contacted her. I had given myself over to writing it, asking only one thing of each sentence and each idea: must this be said, and must it be said this way? It’s risky to draw stick figures in an academic book, but Pamela embraced not just the arguments and ideas but also the spirit of the act that created them. I also want to thank the press’s director Megan Hall for her enthusiasm, and editor Peter Midgley for his generous and sensitive revisions.

Finally, as always, thank you to Kristi and to Ben and Ellie.