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An exploration is made of how the environmental justice movement in the United States has taken on some of the communicative and participatory demands and practices of critical pluralism. The movement has been critical of the communicative methods of the mainstream – the top-down organizational structure and its one-way nature of communication, and the lack of attention to issues of public participation in policy-making – and issues of communication have been a central focus in the development and demands of environmental justice. Accepting the diversity and the situated experiences of individuals and cultures has fostered the use of, and demand for, a variety of innovative communicative processes. Internally, the movement has attempted to employ more open discursive processes, paying particular attention to communication within and across diverse groups. Externally, the movement has made demands with regard to issues of communication and more discursive and participatory policy-making on government agencies, particularly the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Through contrastive case studies, this chapter shows how language ideologies can vary not only between but within ethnic groups. It discusses implications for current models of language shift and revitalization, especially as applied to multilingual linguistic ecologies found in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast region. The Mayangna language enjoys institutional support under Nicaragua’s progressive language policies: official status, intercultural-bilingual education programmes, and strong backing from the local university, URACCAN. Another more powerful indigenous language, Miskitu, also forms part of repertoires of the Mayangna communities. The authors trace the historical development in two sets of Mayangna communities of two very different social ecologies of language and their concomitant language ideologies as expressed through informal discourse about language and daily communicative practices. It is argued that language maintenance or revitalization efforts must entail prior establishment of the ideological position(s) of the community that claims the language as its own.

The analysis of long-distance communication in Herodotus emphasizes the closeness of oral and written messages, and the negative connotations of epistolary writing. Letter-writing characters are marked in Herodotus as oriental or tyrannical; letter writing itself can be often deceptive (and references to letters are striking enough to be used as structuring devices within the narrative). This is no longer the case in Thucydides, although letters still tend to prove dysfunctional when viewed in the context of the polis. Xenophon’s attitude towards letter writing is similar to that of Thucydides. A marked change is noticeable in Ctesias, to whom the first embedded love letter is owed: henceforward letters play an important role. The chapter argues that this change reflects a more general change in the communicative practices in Greece, recognizable also in the fragments of ancient historians from the fourth, third, and second century BC and, in particular, in Polybius’s work.

This chapter looks at the impact of some of the technological innovations on the communicative practices of professional communities and genres, in the light of the new developments in the age of globalization and the growing expansion of English, from a socioeconomic and sociolinguistic perspective as well as a technological one. The new technological affordances are extremely innovative and have a major impact on the discourse of professional communities, but they also proliferate rapidly and can be generically unstable. The chapter refers to examples drawn from the professional domains examined in the previous chapters (thus medicine, law and education), also with the aim of showing some of their stylistic features. It also looks at the discourse of a number of multimodal texts and blogs in order to examine their stylistic choices and to see how they are affected by the technological innovations and affordances.

This chapter examines the orality and development of the text of Caedmon's Hymn. It explores the literary and communicative practices of societies before the adoption of writing and identifies the traces of orality in the visual cues such as lineation, word division, and punctuation in fourteen surviving manuscript copies of this work. It suggests that Hymn is a striking evidence for the ways in which literacy and orality were accommodated to one another in Anglo-Saxon England.

This chapter speaks to scholars in the field of communication studies, surveying literature on organizational democracy, storytelling, and worker voice. It first discusses the unique contributions of the present case study, unusual in its focus on labor unions as sites of activity and agency, to academic work on worker voice and democracy in workplace institutions. The gains won during contract struggles and strikes reveal how, ultimately, worker agency is a function of both communicative practice and economic clout. Second, it brings the author's past scholarship in rhetorical studies to bear on the union dissident activity at Boeing. This part of the chapter emphasizes the importance of a dialectical theory regarding the interaction of structure and agency. It argues that the gaps and contradictions between lived experience of exploitation and the discourses that justify or overlook that exploitation are resources for critique and action. For both organizational communication and rhetorical studies, the present case forces the recognition that worker agency is a combination of communication and clout.