Appetite for Imagination: The Rhetoric of Hunger Advocacy and Political Imaginaries

This dissertation is the product of five years’ worth of data-collection, interviews, participant-observation in the field, and scores of analyses, all in the service of attempting to answer one rather large question: can local-level changes in discourse lead to larger-scale changes in political structure? And if so, how does this process of discursive and political change occur? Eventually, through many reviews of literature in public sphere theory and social movement rhetoric, I realized that the real problematic at the heart of this inquiry was the issue of collective persuasion – or the changing of a public’s consciousness on a scale that expands beyond the traditional rhetorical situation model of speaker and addressee. This, I thought, would be the key to staking a strong claim for rhetoric in the study of social movements writ large.