Citizenship Studies

ISSN: 1362-1025 (Print) 1469-3593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive

crafting and enactment of citizenship

Christian Kock & Lisa S. Villadsen

To cite this article: Christian Kock & Lisa S. Villadsen (2017): Rhetorical citizenship:
studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship, Citizenship Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13621025.2017.1316360

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2017.1316360

Published online: 11 Apr 2017.

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Citizenship Studies, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2017.1316360

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and

enactment of citizenship
Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the Received 28 November 2016
study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship Accepted 19 February 2017
as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly KEYWORDS
approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, Rhetorical citizenship;
and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how rhetoric; rhetorical analysis;
this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies agency; New Year’s Speech;
mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and #PeopleReachingOut;
illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In dissensus
close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are
shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship
vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical
perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close
attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that
may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding
of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep
differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.

With the rhetorician Robert Asen, we ask, ‘how do people enact citizenship?’ (Asen 2004,
191), and we point to the need for rhetorically oriented studies of citizenship as discursively
enacted, proposing to consider the discursive aspects of citizenship as one of its constitutive
dimensions.
Taking stock of ten years of scholarship in Citizenship Studies, sociologist Christian
Joppke identified three dimensions of citizenship:
citizenship as status, which denotes formal state membership and the rules of access to it; cit-
izenship as rights, which is about the formal capacities and immunities connected with such
status; and, in addition, citizenship as identity, which refers to the behavioral aspects of individ-
uals acting and conceiving of themselves as members of a collectivity. (2007, 38, italics added)
Sociologists Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist, surveying the literature, defined citizenship
in terms of two features broadly corresponding to two of Joppke’s: first, inclusion in, vs.
exclusion from, membership in a polity; second, duties and rights conferred by membership
(2009, 1); here too, however, identity is seen as a dimension of citizenship.

CONTACT  Lisa S. Villadsen  lisas@hum.ku.dk

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

Significantly, in citizenship scholarship there has long been an understanding, albeit

at times implicit, that citizenship also includes discursive or communicative aspects. For
example, the political philosopher Pieter Boele van Hensbroek, defining ‘cultural citizen-
ship’ as ‘the ability to co-author the cultural context in which one lives’ (2010, 317), sees
the term ‘discursive citizenship’ as equally fitting. Similarly, in educational thought and
practice communication has long been seen as a crucial dimension of citizenship. A notable
example concerns the introduction of citizenship education in Britain. The political theo-
rist Bernard Crick, the architect of this initiative (cf. Education for Citizenship 1998), saw
‘political literacy’ as a goal of citizenship education, emphasizing reason-giving as central
to it (1999, 348). It is clear, then, that as the notion of citizenship has risen on scholars’
agenda, its discursive manifestations have, at least implicitly, also been seen as important.
From a different angle, humanistic scholars have also focused on the discursive dimen-
sions of citizenship with research agendas involving discourse in formal and informal set-
tings. For example, the rhetorician Robert Asen, drawing in particular on the thinking of
John Dewey, proposed a ‘discourse theory of citizenship’ (2004) as an avenue for exploring
common, but under-theorized practices instantiating the enactment of citizenship:
Discourse practices present potentially accessible and powerful everyday enactments of cit-
izenship. Even regular voters can vote only periodically, and most people cannot undertake
volunteering as a full-time job. By contrast, discourse practices suggest a frequency and sus-
tainability to civic engagement. (207)
So, to understand the discursive elements of citizenship as lived experience we should
study the ways it is constituted in communicative practices, not just by elite actors such as
politicians, journalists, etc., but also by ‘lay’ citizens whose participation can range from
actively communicating to a greater public to more ‘passive’, critical participation in public
debate in the form of reception and assessment of the rhetoric they are p ­ resented with.
Rhetoricians Kock and Villadsen (2012, 2014) proposed the term rhetorical ­citizenship as
a conceptual frame for such study. Around the same time, the rhetorician Robert Danisch
developed the same term, drawing particular inspiration from Dewey’s thinking on
­democracy (2007, 2011, 2015). To Joppke’s mapping of the study of citizenship we propose
‘rhetorical citizenship’ as a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to
the topic.
To this end we introduce our theoretical position on citizenship as discursively con-
stituted, lay out our use of the term rhetoric, discuss the double meaning of ‘rhetorical
citizenship’ as both a critical frame and a civic practice, and illustrate its use in readings of
two examples from Danish public discourse, both regarding the so-called refugee crisis of
2015. We conclude by positioning rhetorical citizenship in the cross-disciplinary context
of citizenship studies.

Citizenship as discursively constituted

This article argues for and exemplifies ‘rhetorical citizenship’ as a conceptual, analytical, and
critical approach to studying the discursive aspects of civic life. Before detailing the impli-
cations of this approach we wish to acknowledge that citizenship has been a central theme
in much rhetorical scholarship in recent years. Cisneros (2014) categorizes this emerging
subfield of rhetoric according to the different emphases in research contributions on the
‘what, where, who and how’ of the relation between rhetoric and citizenship (2). We see
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   3

our approach as straddling several of these perspectives in that we conceive of rhetorical

citizenship as concerned, at least, with the ‘what’, the ‘who’, the ‘how’. In our conception
rhetorical citizenship is both a theoretical construct aimed at capturing the ways in which
citizenship is discursively constituted and enacted, and a critical approach to studying its
manifestations in societal practice. As with the term rhetoric itself, the term rhetorical
citizenship can thus also refer to the practices studied under this heading.
With this article we hope to encourage scholars across disciplines to consider more closely
how notions and practices of citizenship are formed and realized discursively, how we ‘speak’
citizenship. In terms of research objects this involves studying utterances in which these
functions are in evidence, i.e., not just documents and statements establishing the formal
conditions of citizenship (e.g. legal statutes, rules, rulings), but also more quotidian and
vernacular discourse (e.g. newspaper editorials, speeches, debates). In multiple ways and
settings discourse takes place in which citizenship in a polity is crafted and enacted; it may
happen in public, perhaps mediated, discourse, or in interpersonal and private settings.
Also, there is a wide range of non-discursive manifestations and objects, e.g. demonstra-
tions, Internet memes, etc., through which citizens interpret and enact their roles as citizens
(Lewicki 2016; Isin and Nielsen 2008). Important societal values thus are brought into being
and modified among citizens in manifold communicative modes.
Rhetorical citizenship as a conceptual frame and an analytical approach aims to enrich
the ongoing exploration of citizenship by studying the multiple ways that citizenship is
crafted and enacted communicatively. To the extent that citizenship means to be a member
of a polity and take on that identity, the specific nature of such membership is dynami-
cally crafted (constituted, defined, shaped) by rhetorical acts (e.g. political figures giving
speeches). Likewise, citizens enact their citizenship rhetorically when they interact as cit-
izens in language and/or other symbolic systems, for example when they present, hear, or
read opinions and arguments to find their own position on an issue of shared concern.
Such discursive processes are neither peripheral nor prefatory to civic action; they enact
civic membership and may be instrumental in crafting or constituting it by modifying or
defining its terms. Citizenship is (also) something we do.
Hence, we argue that studies exploring manifestations of, challenges to, and experiments
in rhetorical citizenship are needed to flesh out existing conceptualizations of citizenship.
We wish to supplement the threefold partitioning of citizenship quoted above (as involving
status, rights, and identity), calling for more emphasis on the less formal dimension defina-
ble as the ‘behavioral aspects’ of citizens’ ‘acting and conceiving of themselves as members
of a collectivity’ (to reiterate Joppke’s words). Thus, ‘rhetorical citizenship’ is not to be one
more item on Kivisto and Faist’s list (2007, 2) of notions of citizenship – including, e.g.,
‘world citizenship’, ‘gendered citizenship’, and others. Rather, we argue for looking at how
citizenship always has a discursive dimension across all such manifestations, and for the
relevance of rhetoric to study this.

The terms ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Rhetorical’

Our use of the term ‘rhetorical’ may require clarification. With ‘rhetoric’ we refer to a tra-
dition in communication studies dating back to antiquity and continuing as an academic
field of inquiry to our day (Bizzell and Herzberg 1990; Lucaites, Condit, and Caudill 1999).
In this tradition the term ‘rhetoric’ has a twofold application: it refers to the practice of
4   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

civic communication as well as to the academic study of it. This definition might need new
emphasis because there are other widespread conceptions of ‘rhetoric’ that tend to mislead.
In one usage, ‘rhetoric’ is the antithesis of ‘reality’, as in hollow talk by political leaders
unmatched by action or policy. An example is that Joppke, perhaps inadvertently, implies
this dichotomy when he asks: ‘Has there been a restrictive turn of Canadian citizenship?
The answer is: in political rhetoric “yes,” at least on the conservative end of the political
spectrum; but with respect to policy “no.”’(2013, 9) Another, related usage seems to equate
‘rhetoric’ with manipulative or demagogical discourse more concerned with strategic effect
than with reason or truth, as in references to, e.g., ‘the rhetorical strategies present in anti-im-
migrant online activism’, including its ‘rhetoric of racist hate and patriotic righteousness’
(Marciniak 2013, 260, 265). A third usage, less clearly derogatory, understands ‘rhetoric’
as discourse marked by being particularly emotional, passionate, figurative, or otherwise
‘deviant’ in relation to unmarked, ‘rational’ discourse; for example, we hear about the ‘rhe-
torical mobilisation of affect by political leaders’ (Johnson 2010, 500).
These usages are all at odds with a pervasive understanding of the term ‘rhetoric’ in
the rhetorical tradition This understanding does not define rhetoric in terms of particular
textual properties, but by its function: societal discourse relating to collective decisions and
other matters of shared concern in a polity (Kock 2009).

Democracy and rhetoric

For the purposes of this article we highlight rhetoric’s long association with democracy and
thereby implicitly align our approach with a ‘republican’ view of the discipline as wedded
to the participatory practice of democracy that emerged in ancient Athens. The rhetorical
tradition has many strands, as do contemporary rhetoric research communities, and our
somewhat cropped presentation of the field here is only for reasons of space and the pur-
poses of clarity.
From the beginning of democracy, rhetoric was pivotal to it. To Aristotle, rhetoric was a
necessary component of statecraft. A state should secure for all citizens the ‘Supreme Good’,
which is why the science of politics is the master-craft, ‘the most authoritative of the sciences’.
Accordingly he names rhetoric, along with ‘domestic economy and strategy’, as ‘one of the
most highly esteemed of the faculties’ in the state (1995, Nicomachean Ethics 1094a): rhet-
oric helps the polity perform its function. More recently, political theorist Bryan Garsten
has defended the rhetorical tradition’s conception of deliberative exchange, an alternative to
ideals based on rationalist discourse theory along Habermasian lines. When citizens engage
in rhetorical persuasion, Garsten argues, they are serious and do their best, precisely because
their own personal interests are at stake. At the same time, rhetorical deliberation brings to
politics ‘a certain attentiveness to others. To influence the judgment of another person, as
rhetoric aims to do, one must pay attention to his or her particular commitments, sentiments,
and tastes’ (2006, 198). This commitment to ‘getting through to’ those of different views runs
through the rhetorical tradition, partly in terms of advice on how to keep the conversation
going, to listen to and address the other’s stance, and to suggest solutions that take diverse
perspectives into account (Isocrates 1968; Booth 2004; Ratcliffe 2005).
While a rhetorical stance typically sees it as a task to facilitate debate on shared issues,
it doesn’t assume that citizens can eventually reach consensus, or even that they should. A
core concern in rhetoric is how citizens can live together productively under conditions of
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   5

dissensus. The rhetorician Robert Ivie identifies as a key challenge ‘how to communicate
politically without an exclusionary aim for consensus and unity or a reduction of difference
to total otherness’. He seeks a conception of deliberation that promotes democratic practice
in the here and now rather than postponing it into a hypothetical future, disciplined by
the illusion of rational consensus (2002, 278). In this he seconds Young’s view (1997, 2002)
that political deliberation must encompass rhetoric as a necessary and positive attribute.
Ivie, however, sees democratic deliberation as primarily rhetorical. This is tantamount to
accepting political discussion as essentially agonistic and robust enough to accommodate
a measure of disagreement as sound and genuinely democratic. This stance also aligns with
Chantal Mouffe’s defense of an ‘agonistic’ notion of democratic disagreement against ‘antag-
onistic’ conceptions on the one hand and consensus-oriented ideals on the other (2005).
Drawing on Ivie’s and Mouffe’s embrace of the ‘rowdiness’ of public discourse and political
debate as an agon, we suggest that the perhaps most important contribution rhetoric can
make to the study of civic life is this tolerance of disagreement and flux. In our studies of
discursive manifestations of citizenship, we do not ask what kind of public argument comes
to the right conclusions, but what kind of public argument can keep people talking with
each other, and not just talk about each other or, worse, discontinue talking. Rhetorical
citizenship as a theoretical and critical approach studies the conditions for such an ideal.

Rhetorical citizenship as a practice

Like the term rhetoric, which denotes both a theory and a practice, rhetorical citizenship
refers not only to a theoretically founded approach to communication but also to ‘real life’
communicative practices.
Several rhetoricians have theorized and studied various discursive instantiations of citi-
zenship. Hauser’s work on ‘vernacular rhetoric’ helped reorient work on political rhetoric to
include everyday civic interaction (1999a). Asen’s ‘discourse theory of citizenship’ proposed
viewing citizenship as a ‘mode of public engagement’, not a set of specific acts, recognizing
‘fluid, multimodal, and quotidian enactments of citizenship in a multiple public sphere’
(2004, 191). Rhetorical expression on civic matters can take many forms, discursive or
symbolic, across multiple genres. From blogs to poetry slams, rhetorical citizenship is not
tied to one particular mode or genre of communication.
When it comes to the praxis of rhetorical citizenship the focus is on the performative as
well as receptive practices, i.e., citizens’ performance of civic discourse or other symbolic
action and their reception of it. We have so far primarily alluded to discourse in the political
realm, but citizens also practice rhetorical citizenship when they are not actively engaged
in political deliberation. Interpersonal discussions, as well as consideration of arguments
in one’s own mind, assessing and weighing arguments to form one’s own opinion, are also
rhetorical practices. Citizens placed at the receiving end of public discourse (as newspaper
and blog readers, TV viewers, public debate audiences, etc.) can use it to engage in ‘delib-
eration within’, to adopt the political theorist Robert Goodin’s phrase (2000).
Focusing on how citizens actually communicate with each other on shared concerns
allows us to consider both macro and micro practices, always with an eye to the significance
for the individuals involved. This aim is met by rhetorical analysis. The readings that follow
present two examples illustrating different aspects of rhetorical citizenship. The fact that
the examples are both textual (rather than, say, material or audio-visual) is accidental; they
6   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

have been chosen because they relate to the same political situation, which makes them
suitable for juxtaposition. But first a few comments on what a rhetorical approach entails
for scholarly practice.

A rhetorical approach to studying citizenship

Our analytical and critical approach is a form of close textual reading best characterized
as rhetorical criticism (Campbell and Burkholder 1997; Foss 2004). This approach is con-
cerned with the description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation of utterances. In this
it shares key concerns with other practices in qualitative humanistic scholarship, such as
Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak 2011), Discourse Theory
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985), and framing analysis (Lakoff 2008). An in-depth comparison of
these critical approaches is beyond the scope here, but a few traits distinctive of a rhetorical
approach are in order.
Rhetorical analysis typically characterized by looking closely at specific texts and text
passages as entry points where linguistic particulars prove themselves revelatory of signif-
icant societal assumptions and views. A full understanding of the specific context (time,
place, topic, speaker) and situation (audience, exigence, constraints) is considered necessary
for appreciating the functions of a text, persuasive or otherwise (Campbell and Burkholder
1997; Bitzer 1968). Rhetorical analysis is traditionally sensitive to aspects of discourse relat-
ing to genre because this is an apt avenue to considerations of purpose. Rhetorical theory
crucially sees discourse not just as propositions, but as actions, and genres as sites or meet-
ing grounds of social action (Miller 1984). On this view, genre is a recognizable ‘mode’ for
speakers and audiences alike to serve particular purposes. In giving a political speech, the
speaker is thus aided by his or her knowledge of previous political rhetoric in, e.g., the
introduction of a political project, and the audience is guided by its expectations to political
rhetoric in understanding what the speaker is up to in talking to them about this.
In also paying close attention to all textual levels below the genre level (including argu-
mentation as well as stylistic traits such as word choice and grammar), rhetorical analysis
pursues the question of the function of the text, both when this coincides with an explicitly
stated purpose by the speaker and when there is a difference between the explicit message
and what is said or done implicitly. Implicit utterance in discourse happens continually, and
rhetorical analysis can illuminate how. Analyses of ‘framing’ (as demonstrated by Lakoff and
others) point in particular to the potential ideological effects of the ways phenomena are
named, i.e., to aspects of vocabulary. But beyond that, patterns of syntax, grammar, phra-
seology, cohesion, structure, etc., are among the aspects that help determine how a text will
function; for example, mentioning something first or last in a sequence makes a difference
of effect. All the same features also continually draw implicit profiles not only of the speaker
(sometimes referred to as the speaker’s persona or ethos), but – equally importantly – of
the hearer(s), sometimes referred to as the ‘second persona’ (Black 1970). In virtue of all
these implicit signals, which often work subliminally, hearers may feel addressed and their
identity reflected in a piece of discourse, and it may even function as ‘constitutive rhetoric’
(Charland 1987) in the sense that it calls into being the identity to which it is addressed.
Thus, minute details, often disregarded in accounts of what was ‘said’, may play a part in
building the ‘first’ and ‘second’ persona of a piece of discourse. For example, as we shall
see in one of the examples to follow, the fact that in the citizens’ counter-advertisement
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   7

certain parts were in a ‘handwritten’ font belongs among the minutiae that help determine
rhetorical effect – as evidenced also in, e.g., commercial advertising.
While rhetorical analysis aims to understand all these features through which discourse
may act upon hearers’ and readers’ minds, it recognizes the fact that most discourse is, in
principle, attempts by humans to influence other humans; it is how this happens that may
become an object of critical evaluation. Rhetoric is, in the words of Kenneth Burke, one of
the foundational rhetorical thinkers in modern times, ‘the use of words by human agents
to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents’ (1969, 41). In that sense
communication is, in the rhetorical optic, essentially ‘strategic’, and human societies could
not have come about nor undergo change without it. Rhetoric, when compared with other
approaches to the study of discourse, places particular importance on seeing discourse as
action, not just as propositions or meaning-making; hence a rhetorical approach is distinc-
tive for its attention to how specific pieces of discourse may act on audiences. By the same
token, a rhetorical approach also sees individuals as potential agents of influential discourse;
in a term current in rhetorical scholarship, individuals do have potential ‘agency’ (Hauser
2004; Campbell 2005).
The rhetorical approach we suggest is thus distinct from other communicatively oriented
approaches in that it is on the one hand not purely descriptive, but committed to critical
evaluation of what it studies; on the other hand, our approach is not systematically skeptical
in its study of political communication, considering it, e.g., as hegemonic discourse systems,
exercising a one-way influence on individuals’ minds. The rhetorical approach reflects a
view that ascribes potential political agency to citizens; as a corollary we recognize citizens’
need to hear and read deliberative discourse from politicians and public figures as input
to their own deliberations.
Our rhetorical approach is thus characterized by a critical focus on specific utterances
to a larger extent than, e.g., approaches promoting the notion of deliberative democracy,
which tend to be primarily theoretical in orientation. Like deliberative democrats we con-
sider deliberative discourse as essential to democracy; however, unlike some of the original
inspirations for deliberative democracy we do not subscribe to the belief that deliberation,
even in some optimal form, will lead to consensus. Instead, we see dissensus as intrinsic to
democracy and rhetoric as its mode.

Rhetorical citizenship in the context of the so-called European refugee crisis

To illustrate the critical application of the concept of rhetorical citizenship we turn to two
examples from recent civic discourse, both relating to the situation where large numbers of
refugees were coming to Europe, in particular public reactions to the arrival of refugees to
Denmark. Analyzing the two types of reactions from the perspective of rhetorical citizenship
will, we hope, yield a richer understanding of the notion of citizenship as discursively crafted
and enacted. Both examples speak to what it means, or should mean, to be a Danish citizen,
but they represent very different rhetorical agents and situations: one is a citizen-driven
initiative reacting against an officially sanctioned message to potential refugees, the other
is the televised New Year’s address by an institutional authority, the Danish Prime Minister,
Mr. Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
A few words about the background: 2015 saw a drastic increase in the flux of people
fleeing countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia and heading for Europe.
8   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

In 2015 more than 800,000 refugees were registered by Frontex, the EU agency for border
control, a 400% increase over the year before. The spring and summer brought several
reports of drowning accidents involving overloaded boats sailing from North Africa to
Italy. In April 2015, 800 refugees drowned south of the Italian island of Lampedusa when a
rescue ship collided with their boat. In August, only 400 were rescued from the wreck of a
boat carrying upwards of 700 African refugees from Libya. A couple of events in particular
propelled the issue to the forefront of public debate, this time primarily involving refugees
from Syria and Afghanistan coming via Turkey to Greece: in late August, Austrian police
found 50 refugees, dead by suffocation, in the back of an abandoned truck. Next, images
of a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy, drowned in the attempt to cross from Turkey to
Greece with his family, shocked the world.
In the general election in Denmark in June 2015, a liberalist government came to power
on a narrow majority. The new Minister of Immigration and Refugees, Ms. Inger Støjberg,
immediately announced various initiatives to reduce the number of refugees seeking asylum
in Denmark. Among these initiatives was a cut in the monthly social benefits paid to asylum
seekers, and a plan to place an advertisement in Middle-Eastern newspapers informing
potential refugees about the newly enacted restrictions in Danish immigration laws, includ-
ing the reduced public support that asylum seekers would receive if coming to Denmark.
In early September the advertisement was printed in Lebanese newspapers (widely read
in the Middle East) (Ritzau 2015). It explained that refugees would receive up to 50% less
money than previously, and if granted permission to stay as asylum seekers, they would
have to wait for over a year before their family might be allowed to join them in Denmark.

Example 1: ‘PeopleReachingOut’
The Danish government’s policies on refugees were not received positively by all citizens. One
group of citizens was so appalled by the government’s actions that they initiated a collection
of money on Facebook to counter the government’s advertisement in Middle Eastern news-
papers (https://www.facebook.com/PeopleReachingOut-modannonce-914126691997724/).
Hundreds of donations were given, and one week after the printing of the official adver-
tisement they placed a copy of it in the same Lebanese media, but with the addition of a
‘handwritten’ note at the top identifying the main part of the document as: ‘Official state-
ment from the Danish government’: and below the official text, with a hand-drawn heart
at the top left corner, a note marked as ‘A statement from people to people’, carrying the
message, ‘Sorry for the hostility towards refugees expressed here. As ordinary Danes we
wish to extend our sympathy and compassion to anyone fleeing war and despair’. It was
signed, ‘#PeopleReachingOut’ (Damkjær 2015). Both the government’s ad and the coun-
ter-ad received international attention (Corfixen 2015; Ma 2015; Lüdke 2015; Taylor 2015).
Before we turn to the significance of this ad from the perspective of rhetorical citizenship,
a brief textual analysis is in order. In several ways, the text signals its ‘grassroots’ status. The
‘handwritten’ notes added, in red ink, to the official document eliminated any risk of mis-
understanding the status of the ad as a revised official version: the government’s text stands
unaltered, just annotated. There is thus no suggestion that the policy has been changed, only
that it doesn’t enjoy universal acceptance among the Danish people. On Facebook, people
sympathetic to the group’s initiative criticized the counter-ad for reprinting the govern-
ment’s text and leaving it legible instead of, e.g., minimizing it to allow the counter-message
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   9

to stand in more relief. The group responded that the intention was not to silence the
government’s voice in the way the citizen group felt that their voices had been silenced
in the government’s presentation of Denmark to potential refugees. They wanted, rather,
to signal that there were people of different opinions than the government’s in Denmark.
This counter-government stance was also signaled stylistically. In addition to the choice of
handwriting instead of printed letters, there was the placement of the message as a sort of
P.S. reminiscent of a personal letter where one adds an afterthought at the end. Similarly,
the fact that the added message carried a form of signature made it stand out against the
Ministry’s impersonal brief; all these details suggested that this was a note quickly jotted
down signaling informality and immediacy suited to create a personal and authentic tone.
The hand-drawn heart of course underscored this, too. Indeed, it seemed to introduce the
conspicuous intimacy often seen in private interactions in Western world social media where
friends are liberal with expressions of love for friends, ‘kisses’, etc.1 Unlike a personal letter,
where a signature would be marked by a salutation like ‘Best regards’, this one was marked
by a hashtag, alluding to the social network Twitter, where topics are discussed in ‘threads’
with headings marked by the hashtag. Since 2004, when Twitter was first systematically
used for social and political mobilization in connection with the Orange Revolution in the
Ukraine, this social network signals in part an ethos of a grassroots culture associated with
authenticity and democratic principles, and the PeopleReachingOut initiative borrows some
of that ethos by using the hashtag.
While mainly a symbolic gesture that in all likelihood was more meaningful to the
individuals involved than to refugees in the Middle East, the counter-ad is an interesting
manifestation of rhetorical agency by citizens finding their understanding of what it means
to be part of the Danish society misrepresented and then taking steps to reclaim or at least
nuance the meaning of Danish citizenship. Such negotiations of course are an integral part
of political life; every time a law is passed it somehow reflects the norms and priorities of
the community. The citizens’ initiative, however, illustrates a group of citizens taking the
definitional work of what it means to be Danish in their own hands when they saw the gov-
ernment performing an attitude they felt misrepresented their views and their identity as
Danes. Regardless of its arguable political naïveté and its effect, or lack thereof, on refugees’
and other nations’ view of Denmark, the counter-advertisement is interesting as an example
of ‘ordinary’ citizens mobilizing – in a short time and in highly informal ways – to contest a
discursively constructed image of Denmark’s attitude towards refugees and seek to alter it.
In taking it upon themselves to directly communicate their disagreement – to each other,
to the refugees, and perhaps to third party on-lookers – the PeopleReachingOut initiative
can be construed as an example of rhetorical citizenship in practice.
Understanding citizenship as in part discursively defined and enacted means that the
way we talk about civic issues both reflects and affects the way we see our place in the com-
munity and the nature of that community. Citizenship, as already stated, is something we
do. The PeopleReachingOut initiative illustrates the connection between civically oriented
communication and identity. The group behind the initiative found it imperative to mark
– to individuals and publics abroad as well as to themselves – that the government’s adver-
tisement reflected an attitude towards refugees that did not resonate with their views, and
which they felt to be oppressive and destructive. The initiative can be seen as a response to
a strongly felt frustration that conventional political pronouncements and debate seemed
futile in a situation where a majority in Parliament could dictate its policies, maintaining
10   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

a state of apparent political paralysis in the face of a humanitarian crisis that was fast
approaching in time as well as space. Instead, these individuals claimed a speaking position
as citizens. Eschewing party politics, they sought to introduce an element of empathy to
the discourse expressing empathy with thousands of people on a desperate journey, thus
presumably attempting to negate the implied suspicion in the government document that
the arriving people were fortune seekers rather than refugees.

Example 2: The Prime Minister’s New Year’s speech

Central among the uses of the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a critical lens is the atten-
tion it gives to how rhetors of different status, elite or non-elite, contribute to the ongoing
definitional work of what a community stands for. Government leaders are continuously,
in word and action, performing and formulating notions of citizenship. To underscore that
the concept of rhetorical citizenship is as relevant as an analytical frame for institutional as
for vernacular discourse, we will consider the Danish Prime Minister’s New Year’s speech
for 2016 (Rasmussen 2016).
Part of the speech addressed a theme of obvious relevance for a notion of rhetorical citi-
zenship: the state of political debate. Closely following the government’s defeat in a referen-
dum on a contentious EU-related issue, the Prime Minister reminded citizens that ‘we need a
better conversation with each other. Where we listen, also – perhaps in particular – to those
we disagree with. Where we recognize that an issue has several sides. I wish to contribute to
that’. Thus it might be said that the speech points to a crucial aspect of deliberative debate
or reflection on a political issue: The Prime Minister talks about listening to the other side
and recognizes, albeit implicitly, that there are usually relevant contradictory considerations
belonging, as it were, to different dimensions. On the issue of what the mainstream media
referred to as the refugee ‘crisis’, for example, there are clearly, on the one hand, economic
and social considerations (enjoining us to ’take care’ of Denmark, as we shall see below),
and on the other hand, humanitarian and ethical ones. Between these considerations there
is no simple, generally agreed commensurability.
Before drawing this picture of a deliberative rhetorical citizenship, however, the Prime
Minister devoted most of the speech to the arrival of refugees and other asylum seekers.
The speech lends itself to a rhetorical analysis with a double focus: how did it represent
Danish citizenship, in light of the Prime Minister’s descriptions of (and his reaction to) the
situation that the country found itself in? And what options were presented for the listeners
to enact that citizenship?
In terms of genre, the speech has traits in common with Aristotle’s conception of ‘epi-
deictic’ speech (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1991, 1358b–1359a): it is given to mark a particular
moment (the New Year) and its collective significance (what are the common challenges and
how will shared values and principles help the population face them?). In recent years the
Prime Minister’s New Year’s speeches have, however, increasingly taken up clearly political
and partisan topics. This speech being no exception, it is properly considered a genre hybrid.
Politicians’ supposedly epideictic speeches are usually given scant attention because they
are not expected to declare new policies, but this hybrid nevertheless does political work.
Indeed, rhetorical theory (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, Hauser 1999b) emphasizes
that epideictic rhetoric has important political functions in that it tends to celebrate and con-
solidate social values, which may then serve to support or warrant actual policies. Political
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   11

leaders who give such speeches are thus able to implicitly introduce political positions that,
if presented explicitly in an openly political genre, would not be as readily accepted by the
citizenry. For this reason we will look at the speech to identify how it implicitly draws the
Prime Minister’s ideal image of citizenship in Denmark.
The key phrase of the speech is: ‘We must take care of Denmark’ [Vi skal passe på
Danmark]. It occurs eight times. The word choice bears noticing. It connotes the nurturing
care one would give a child and thus has softer and more humanistic overtones than words
such as ‘protect’ or ‘defend’. This is a rhetorically significant choice. It frames Denmark as
a beloved, but somehow at-risk entity in need of the solicitous care of the government,
and of all citizens. At the same time it frames the political response advocated as positive
and active, ‘taking care of/caring for’, rather than as negative and reactive, which is what
words such as ‘protect’ or ‘defend’ would suggest. Yet the content of the speech suggests that
what the Prime Minister announces is in fact a protective and defensive approach to what
is framed as outside menaces. Thus his opening remarks are dedicated to an individual,
a Danish national belonging to the Jewish community, who, as he was volunteering as a
security guard at a bar mitzvah2 in the Copenhagen synagogue in February 2015, was shot
dead by a terrorist. The Prime Minister celebrates this man, Dan Uzan, for ‘taking care
of others without any thought of himself ’ (here we have the same phrase, passe på, that
is repeatedly used later) and for showing ‘goodness’ in courageously standing up against
evil. The lesson that the Prime Minister draws from this incident, where the heroic guard
was the victim of a gunman, is that terrorism thrives on the fear it spreads, and that Danes
must never succumb to such fear, nor change the way they look at people with a different
background than their own.
This opening section of the speech, moving from the synagogue killing to terrorism
generally, ends with these words: ‘Thank you to all Danish women and men in the police
and the armed forces. At home and abroad. You take care of Denmark’. The next section
begins: ‘We should all take care of Denmark. Not least at a time when a historically high
number of people are heading for Europe’. The reiteration of the phrase ‘take care of ’ creates
a lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976, 279) that suggests, but does not assert, a topical
overlap between the two sections that is deeper and semantically ‘richer’ than the rather
abstract phrase ‘take care of ’; the explicit verbal cohesion asks listeners to find an unspecified
degree of implicit semantic coherence. Rasmussen presents the guard as a role model for
Danes; what they should do in reaction to the arriving refugees is in some implicit sense
comparable to what he did in reaction to a terrorist’s attack. Throughout the speech, Danes
are described as ‘generous’, ‘willing to help’, ‘open towards the world’ and having ‘a reputation
for acting with decency’. All those qualities must be held on to. Rasmussen lists strengths
of Danish society in this order: ‘The economy, the harmony, the values, the decency’. Later
on, the prospect of ‘extra money’ for social welfare and tax cuts are said to be in danger of
‘disappearing’ due to rising costs of accommodating refugees. This, Rasmussen says, must
not happen because, again, ‘We must take care of Denmark’. So whereas the slain guard
courageously and unselfishly gave his life for the protection of his people, the specific use
in the speech of this incident implicitly casts Danes as behaving in a similarly brave and
worthy manner if they help taking care of their country; and this they can do by thinking
of their own people, their cultural heritage, and their relatively sound economy first in
deciding how to deal with the refugees.
12   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

The current situation, referred to as ‘the migrant and asylum seeker crisis’, is presented
as a crisis for the Danes and their community in Denmark, rather than a crisis for, e.g.,
the refugees, their home countries, or for the EU; migrants are mentioned before asylum
seekers. Their arrival is said to challenge Danes’ fundamental self-understanding and values.
This statement comes only a few seconds after Rasmussen has divided the arriving people
into two groups deserving different reactions: those fleeing war and persecution (refugees
whose fate is called ‘heartbreaking’) and those wanting to leave poverty (migrants whose
wish is called ‘understandable’), and after he has warned against Danes changing ‘the way
they look at people with a different background than their own’. Denmark’s social cohesion
[sammenhængskraft] is ‘challenged’ by the many who arrive from entirely different cultures
and who are said by Rasmussen to be strangers to unwritten rules and norms in Denmark:
‘It challenges our cohesion when many come from quite different cultures. Strangers to
the unwritten rules and norms that are so self-evident to us. Because we are raised in a
tradition of freedom, broad-mindedness [frisind, literally “free-mind”], and equality of
rights and status’. It is worth noting that the second sentence in this passage, when taken at
face value, and if it is to cohere with the first, implies that all the many who come here are
‘strangers’ to all the unwritten rules and norms that are self-evident to ‘us’. And the third
sentence, to cohere with the preceding ones, must imply that the rules and norms to which
all the newcomers are strangers are those of freedom, broad-mindedness, and equality of
rights and status.
On the whole, the Prime Minister rhetorically paints citizenship in Denmark as a shel-
tered and protected state characterized by a coherent, generally accepted set of norms
that will now be challenged if the current influx of people from other cultures is allowed
to continue. While Rasmussen says at one point that citizens are not to succumb to fear,
he in fact implies that the refugee crisis is a danger to Denmark which the people cannot
necessarily handle (since the refugees are implicitly seen as unsettling the country’s social
and cultural foundation). Rasmussen portrays Denmark, not as a robust society, but as a
vulnerable entity beset with danger from without. Instead of appealing to a normative, eco-
nomic, and cultural resilience, as in the German Chancellor Merkel’s optimistic statement
‘Wir schaffen das’ (said at a press conference on August 31, 2015), the Prime Minister casts
the Danish people as more uncertain and fearful and the Danish polity as precarious and
fragile. There is thus a degree of tension between, on the one hand, Rasmussen’s portrait
of the Danish people as ‘generous’, ‘open towards the world’, etc., and on the other hand,
what he repeatedly calls for and defends: an attitude of ‘taking care of ’ our cohesive, caring
community, i.e., our own people (rather than the refugees).
We have considered how the Prime Minister rhetorically contributes to the crafting of
citizenship in Denmark by projecting the Danish society’s stance to the refugee situation.
Trying at the same time to celebrate traditional values of openness and generosity and to
comply with increasing political pressure to limit the intake of foreigners, his account ends,
as it were, on an unresolved dissonance.
The two examples discussed here illustrate how the concept of citizenship is assumed,
used, and contested in public rhetoric. Rasmussen, for his part, equivocally crafts and enacts
an understanding of citizenship that is open and compassionate in the letter but more
restrictive in the spirit. The PeopleReachingOut example, on the other hand, illustrates how
a group of citizens aim to contest and modify the understanding of citizenship promoted
by the Danish government. These examples go to show that citizenship may be variously
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   13

crafted, enacted, and interpreted by different groups in a given society, just as it is subject
to contestation. We chose these examples because they illustrate with particular clarity that
citizenship has rhetorical aspects because citizenship as such is the theme of these examples;
however, rhetorical citizenship may be enacted in discourse/symbolic action on any number
of other civically oriented subjects/themes. The very fact that notions of citizenship can
be used for inclusion as well as exclusion we see as an extra reason why the general notion
of citizenship and the awareness of its rhetorical dimension are useful because they may
facilitate a critical awareness of the specific interpretations and practices of citizenship in
a given national or international context.
Our point in making these comments has been to exemplify how the public rhetoric of
political figures may have the two functions we have indicated in relation to citizenship:
Rasmussen’s speech contributes to the crafting of what citizenship means, or should mean,
in the polity addressed; at the same time it enacts citizenship rhetorically by performing a
discursive act inherent in citizenship – in this case, presenting, interpreting, and prioritizing
some of the countervailing considerations relevant to a current issue of shared concern. As
for the PeopleReachingOut initiative, we wish to emphasize that, politically insignificant
in isolation and to a certain extent communicatively idiosyncratic though such initiatives
might be (the hand-drawn heart icon and the implicit claim to speak on behalf of all ‘ordi-
nary Danes’), they carry symbolic value to the participants and may snowball due to the
affective response from intense circulation on social and other media. It is important that
we as scholars understand how such bottom-up initiatives get started and what drives
them. While rhetorical citizenship doesn’t have to be instantiated in a grassroots, Internet-
driven, humanitarian inflected phenomenon like this one, these features make this example
more characteristic as a non-elite initiative. However, the central point is that the initiative
exemplifies citizenship as discursively constituted and thus subject to collective commu-
nicative negotiation. The concept of rhetorical citizenship provides a theoretical frame for
recognizing this and other informal manifestations as relevant elements in the ongoing
negotiation of a society’s political and social self-understanding.
The purpose of both examples has been to illustrate how the perspective of rhetorical
citizenship may be applied to discourse from elite as well as non-elite sources, and to serve
a fuller sense of the ongoing discursive creation and enactment of civic self-understanding.

Conclusion
The notion that communication, whether elite or vernacular, is significant in the study of
citizenship has been growing in recent years. In this article we have responded to this inter-
est in the discursive aspects of citizenship by proposing ‘rhetorical citizenship’ as a fourth
dimension of citizenship studies in addition to the three dimensions of status, rights, and
identity typically recognized in the citizenship literature. We have introduced the notion
of rhetorical citizenship as a theoretical and analytical approach, illustrating it in readings
of two examples from Danish public discourse relating to the refugee issue. The notion of
rhetorical citizenship offers a frame for studying very diverse discursive and other symbolic
formations to see how they may either contribute to or alter common conceptions and
practices relating to societal identity and cohesion.
The kind of close textual analysis we have exemplified differs from the more quantita-
tively oriented content analysis often employed in the social and political sciences. With
14   C. KOCK AND L. S. VILLADSEN

its focus on the particular, the rhetorical approach is apt to foster a fine-grained under-
standing of how a certain society’s civic environment is continually created, molded, and
challenged in even very mundane and vernacular discursive acts. In further responding
to the question of the relevance of this rhetorical approach we offer the bioethicist Albert
Jonsen’s illustrative metaphor of a hot air balloon versus a bicycle as he explains the rela-
tion between ethical theory and practical judgment. Jonsen compared the theoretical view
to a hot air balloon flying high over the landscape, whereas practical judgment attending
to specific cases is like riding a bicycle across bumpy ground (1991). These metaphors
might also apply to the relation between more quantitative and more qualitatively oriented
studies. The ‘balloon’ view may detect and support directive generalizations for traffic on
the ground, warning, for example, of impasses and dangers invisible from the bicyclist’s
perspective; on the other hand, the ‘bicyclist’ down below can detect novel phenomena
and envisage hypothetical correlations so far not conceptualized and thus not yet amena-
ble to generalizing theory. The bicyclist, in this sense, is like an explorer, and the contri-
bution that qualitative study can make, for example in looking at citizenship through a
rhetorical lens, is thus likely to be placed near the exploratory end of the methodological
spectrum, providing recognition of phenomena and suggesting conceptualizations of
them that may then lead to descriptive and explanatory hypotheses and insights statable
in quantitative terms.
In addition to this analytical approach, rhetoric has theoretical purchase on issues of civic
discourse, not least its recognition of dissensus as a given to be handled constructively. At
a time of contentious and polarizing politics, such as our own, it is particularly important
that frustrated citizens do not turn away from public discourse. Hence, the political theorist
John Dryzek’s work the role of rhetoric in democracy recognizes its indispensability and
seeks a criterion to distinguish desirable from undesirable manifestations of it (2010). He
proposes what he calls a ‘systemic’ evaluation of rhetoric, requiring us to ‘step back and
ask, does the rhetoric in question help create and constitute an effective deliberative system
joining competent and reflective actors?’ (2010, 322). We might rephrase this criterion by
asking, ‘Do we have a kind of civic culture where citizens engage in reflective communi-
cation with each other across differences?’ The political scientist Diana Mutz found that
such ‘cross-cutting’ communication is wanting, and that especially those who are most
politically engaged and active have little of it. In the conclusion of Hearing the Other Side
(2006) Mutz calls for norms and instruction regarding the ‘civil’ handling of political dis-
agreement in dialogue, since civility, she argues, will induce more people to communicate
across disagreement and allow them to find more benefit in it. Such dialogue might focus
on what disagreeing individuals, from their conflicting vantage points, believe would be best
for the ‘common good’, i.e., for the polity of which they are all citizens. When one looks at
the state of contemporary political discourse in several Western nations, there seems to be
good reason to include in the conceptualization of citizenship not only the aspects of status,
rights, and identity on which scholars agree, but also a discursive dimension. A rhetorical
approach to citizenship acknowledges deep differences as given in any polity, pointing at the
same time to the necessity of reflective communication about such differences, and across
them. That, we suggest, is the weightiest reason for scholars to give even more attention to
the rhetorical aspects of citizenship.
 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES   15

Notes
1. 
Incidentally, Facebook has since then added a heart as one of the reaction options meant to
supplement the ‘like’ button.
2. 
Referred to as a ‘confirmation party’. Evidently, the Prime Minister deemed it necessary to
translate this Jewish celebration to a Christian equivalent.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, our colleagues at the Section of Rhetoric
at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen and
Affiliated Professor at the Section of Rhetoric, James Jasinski, for their thoughtful and constructive
comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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