Rewiring Kenneth Burke for the 21st century: Hizb ut-Tahrir's social movement rhetoric and online quest for the caliphate

Abstract

Chapter 1, "Introduction and Overview: Changing the Tools," introduces my dissertation as an attempt to answer two sets of calls: calls for Burkean scholarship on social movements to be updated and calls for case studies of online rhetoric. I explain how social movements have been among the most important users of the Web and I introduce the subject of my dissertation, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain (HTB). Chapter 2, "Social Movement Rhetoric Online: How Form is Formed," conceptualizes a way to meet the challenge of updating Burkean methods to better understand social movement rhetorics created, disseminated, and received online. I examine the Web on its own terms, tracing its origins and blending insights from new media scholarship and rhetorical scholarship.^I introduce and examine relevant Burkean rhetorical concepts, including symbolic action/nonsymbolic motion and rhetorical form.^I argue that previous rhetorical scholarship on social movements, while valuable, has omitted the media-specific analysis necessary to understand the Web as a rhetorical event. Chapter 3, "Rewiring Kenneth Burke," maps a rhetorical understanding of the Web as a vast global hypertext. I develop a critical tool, a three-layered heuristic, toexamine the Web as a whole experience. That tool blends the material specificities of the Web with rhetorical form by considering "Behind the Screen, Off the Screen, and On the Screen." This three-layered heuristic complicates our rhetorical readings of websites as websites, as mediated human drama and supplies a more sensitive means of reading rhetorical context and symbolic action.^Chapter 4, "The Change Needs to be Khilafah," applies the heuristic developed in the third chapter to examine a wide range of artifacts from HTB's online rhetoric surrounding the proposed ban.^I use a case study of HTB's online rhetoric in the two years following the 7/7 bombing and proposed ban to test that heuristic and to show its usefulness for "rewiring" Burkean methods for understanding social movement rhetoric. Chapter 5, "Looking Back, Looking Forward," draws out the overall contributions of this study and suggests some implications for future research.