Consider the Get Well card. Sending a card like this to someone convalescing from an injury or, more likely in our pandemic present, a disease, on the face of it does very little for the afflicted party. It's just a gesture. One that says “Hey, I'm here, I'm thinking of you.” The card's value, writes Chris Ingraham in Gestures of Concern, “lies less in being effective than in being expressive” (2). Taken together, however, far from being either explicitly political or entirely trite, “noninstrumental expressive acts” like sending Get Well cards serve to “enact a spirit of sociality that builds an affective commonwealth” (2). Ingraham, a professor of communication at the University of Utah, argues that as scholars and citizens we need to pay more attention to forms of relations, communication, and rhetoric that go beyond the explicit, verbal, and instrumental, to those that subtly and often imperceptibly shape...
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Book Review|
July 01 2022
Misplaced Concern
Gestures of Concern
, by Chris Ingraham, Durham, NC
: Duke University Press
, 2020
, 254
pages, $99.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4780-0858-3; $26.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4780-0951-1; $26.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4780-1217-7.
Jan Dutkiewicz
Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow with the Governing through Design project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School.
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Cultural Politics (2022) 18 (2): 264–266.
Citation
Jan Dutkiewicz; Misplaced Concern. Cultural Politics 1 July 2022; 18 (2): 264–266. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9716310
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