"Culture, catastrophe, and rhetoric : the texture of political action" : the texture of political action

By emphasizing the texture of political action, this volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic dimension of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. The focus on texture identifies how social context is evident on the surface of an event, in order to analyze the performative dimension of political experience. The attention to catastrophe focuses on how ordinary people are contending with normal system operation becoming indistinguishable from system breakdown. An array of case studies provides an account of how change is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society's capacity for political action.