Colon, Geoffrey. Disruptive Marketing: How Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrids Thinkers Can Teach Us about Navigating the New Normal. Audiobook, American Management Association, 2016.
Main Point: There is the traditional forms of marketing, which continue to be used and held up as standards though they are not the most effective in a post-digital world. There has been a bucking of this system, disruptive marketing, that relies more on telling stories, placing people over products, and leveraging user generated content to drive marketing.
Relevance and Intended Use: Uses interviews with key marketers, statistical growth patterns to make predictions, and outlines ways DIY ethos and user generated content is disruptive to the traditional marketing strategies. These are emergent, often digital, but not yet mainstream in regard to standard practices, and so challenge the status quo of a long-standing practices of companies interacting with consumers.
Dalai Lama, and Sofia Stril-Rever. A Call for Revolution: a Vision for the Future. Audiobook, HarperAudio, 2018.
Main Point: A call to action for youth culture to engage in different forms of communication and activism based on compassion rather than competition. It includes a historical review of acts of disruption and revolution toward a kinder and more compassionate humanity from the perspective of the Dalai Lama.
Relevance and Intended use: Demonstration of how the Dalai Lama demonstrates the qualities of a rhetpunk. Use of secondary materials such as Charter of Universal Responsibility as a form of punkrhet as well at the way in the text he address youth subculture, verbalizing his confidence in their ability and need to lead a revolution.
Fassa, Layla. “A Contemporary Look at Punk From the Global to the Local.” Hyperallergic, 20 Jan. 2020, hyperallergic.com/535560/the-punk-reader-research-transmissions-from-the-local-to-the-global/.
Main Point: Review of the book The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions From The Local and The Global, and outlines/summaries much of the content in a succinct manner.
Relevance and Intended use: Provides an insight into the expansive ideas of what can be seen as punk. Identifies the place the book holds in the greater realm of punk commentary and makes it’s own commentary on what is important to note about the punk scene and mentality on a global scale. This will be helpful in defining different aspects of punk and making a case for the examples of historical punk/rhetoric intersections in people and events.
Gregory, Brad S. Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World. HarperOne, 2018.
Main Point: A historical telling of Martin Luther and the circumstances that lead him to criticize the practice of indulgences. It portrays him as a rebel, countering religious and civic leaders and customs of the time and beginning the Reformation.
Relevance and Intended use: It will provide the background and understanding to examine Martin Luther as a rhetorician with a punk bent to his actions of protest and criticism of the status quo. The revolutionary ideas have informed much of the debate on relationship with relationship to religion.
Hodgson, Justin. Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic. The Ohio State University Press, 2019.
Main Point: Examines the interaction of people with the connected devices and how there is a reciprocal relationship between technology and humans. Within this new horizon of interconnectedness there has been a rise of DIY and tinkering ethos. Concepts explored include the disruption to the way we look at technology as something other than us but more and more there is an integration, and a disruption of our ideas of what is real.
Relevance and Intended use: The exploration of real is an interesting one in regard to punk mentality as it is a search for and push back against many traditional meanings and ideas. The human/technology hybridization is a rebellion against many of our traditional ideas of what it means to be human. The idea of technological tinkers fits with the idea of punk rhetoric and ties in will with the disruptive marketing practices identified in the Colon book.
“Jacob Riis: Revealing ‘How the Other Half Lives’ Reformer.” Reformer – Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” | Exhibitions – Library of Congress, 14 Apr. 2016, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/reformer.html.
Main Point: Covers the life and work of Jacob Riis who worked to reform class created issues, specifically focused on the plight of children. Through a mix of means, including photography, he used any available rhetorical means to challenge the status quo.
Relevance and Intended use: Riis’ use of available means of rhetoric aligns with the punk DIY attitude. He worked in what could be considered early multimodal combination of visual and written forms of communication to highlight the inequities present in New York in the mid to late 1800s.
King, Gilbert. “The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 5 July 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-woman-who-took-on-th-tycoon-651396/.
Main Point: A biographical article about Ida M. Tarbell who in many ways redefined the concepts of investigative journalism and in her work took down the monopoly of Standard Oil and their corrupt practices. She is credited as one of the standard bearers for the progressive era.
Relevance and Intended use: The article outlines the life and actions of Tarbell, providing examples of the way she use words and text in dissent against monopolies and the corrupt practices of business that placed profits before people. This will tie in as well with other examples of investigative journalists as holding to a punk mentality in their work.
Levine, Noah. Dharma Punx: a Memoir. Audiobook, Tantor Audio. 2016.
Main Point: A memoir that reveals the progression and growth, not only of the punk music scene but also the coming to terms of what Punk means as a person grows older. Providing personal insight into the various scenes and attitudes of participants in the punk world, it demonstrates cohesiveness and a seeking of connection in the face of feeling outcast from society for pointing out its shortcomings.
Relevance and Intended use: This provides a personalized examples of how punk mentality plays out with a sense of rejection from mainstream, and how certain personal identifies with the scene change over time and others remain. The Dharma aspect of Noah also ties into the work from the Dalai Lama and the call for a revolution of compassion and connection.
Miroff, Bruce. Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters, and Democrats. University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Main Point: This book outlines a number of individual leaders and influencers in the history of the US. The biographies provide both historical and personal context for the actions these individuals took as well as the results of their dissent. There are excerpts and quotes of the words and rhetoric they used to reach their goals and promote their ideas.
Relevance and Intended use: This text will be useful in identification of both dissent as a value that aligns with punk ethos, as well as identifying specific individuals that embody the rhetpunk idea compared to those icons who do not because while they are leaders they are so within more mainstream ideas. The three individuals to primarily focus on are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eugene V. Debs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Preston, Richard. The Demon in the Freezer: a True Story. Ballantine Books, 2003.
Main Point: Investigative story regarding the eradication of small pox, the potential for pandemic crisis. It explores the circumstances through interviews linked into a story that demonstrates the lives and thinking of the doctors and others who worked to eliminate small pox and to set up protocols to respond to other epidemics.
Relevance and Intended use: Within the interviews and stories, there are a number of instances when different doctors worked with the available materials and means toward the radical goal of eradicating a pathogen. Through this, their rhetoric used to convince and persuade demonstrates a crosspoint of punk ideal of pushing back against medical and public health status quo by use of speech.
Reiley, Giulianna. “But, Is It Punk?” Hyperallergic, 27 Mar. 2012, hyperallergic.com/47703/but-is-it-punk/.
Main Point: There is a need to not be too exclusive regarding what is considered punk. It identifies the desire to exclude and to narrow a definition but how one’s perception of what is and what isn’t punk can become the status quo that needs to be challenged.
Relevance and Intended use: Helps to identify the attitude of punk rather than a strict definition. This helps to add to the argument that punk is an mentality and idea rather than restricted to music and scenes from the 70s forward. It opens the idea that those acts and idea that are counter to mainstream have existed prior to the punk music emergence, and continue to exist after the music scenes initial peaks.
Creating Dissonance 