Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Jennifer Keohane
Behind the Chat
Order: latte
Location: Mobtown Ballroom and Cafe
Distance from Campus: 0.3 miles
Dr. Jennifer Keohane’s path to multiple degrees in rhetoric, including a Ph.D., in communication arts, and The University of Baltimore’s Digital Communication program started with a flyer. On a whim, she went to a debate club meeting early in high school and it would influence much of her next steps. Keohane has studied the role and layers of communication through the lens of social movements, museum exhibits, character assassination and digital media. She is encouraging a new wave of debaters through UBalt’s Campus Debates and Discourse Club.
Q: Your scholarship broadly examines how social movements advocate for change, what’s fascinated you the most when you’ve uncovered stories about people finding their voice?
A: I think there are two things that I would say. The first is that people have, over the course of history, had such creative ways to figure out how to make the arguments they want to make. Women who were anti-slavery were submitting petitions to Congress before they could vote because petitioning was a right that they knew they had. People stand on soapboxes on the corner and literally speak to the streets in New York City. People use memes, people create signs. The creativity that people have had to undertake, when there are barriers to them getting their point across, we can find all throughout history.
The second thing I’ll say, and one of the things that is so interesting to me, is watching people or listening to people speak from what they know. When women were making arguments that they should have the right to vote, for instance, they were talking about their role as mothers, something that they knew very deeply. That was, as they argued, relevant to democratic politics. Trade unionists will organize workers by talking about the value of a hard day’s work, like speaking their truth, speaking their piece about the things that they know very deeply.
For me, I think that’s hopeful, that even when there are all these barriers against you, there are still creative things you can do. That’s rhetoric, which is what my Ph.D. is about, and strategic communication. How do we look at what those obstacles are? How do we identify the audience we want to reach? And then how do we cross those boundaries?
Q: Character assassination, another of your research areas, is a reality we’ve seen play out over history, particularly in politics. And increasingly over the past few decades, social media have localized opportunity, bringing threats into our homes and schools, based on what you’ve discovered about character assassination and reputation management, how would you advise someone to protect themselves?
A: Whenever anyone asked me about character assassination, I always want to point out that it is different now, but not that much. I think social media has democratized who can attack who; you don’t have to have a printing press. But people were attacking each other centuries ago. If you’ve seen the musical Hamilton, you know that Hamilton wrote this big, old pamphlet about why John Adams was the worst person ever, keeping in mind that they were members of the same party. Some of the things—and you can read this in the Congressional Record—that people were saying on the floors of Congress in the 1700s and 1800s would shock you. So, the impetus to attack other people has always been there. I think people tend to assume that our discourse was so much higher back in the day, and that isn’t really true.
What is different now is the democratization that anybody can launch character attacks. And there’s no one right answer to how you protect yourself. I wish I could tell people, say this, do this, but responding to character attacks is always about thinking about the situation. So, understanding who’s attacking me, what are they saying, who is the audience for this attack? It’s sort of the hallmarks of rhetoric. It is much harder to repair a reputation after it has been damaged. So, this sounds like a no duh, but the best thing you can do is to try not to let your reputation get damaged in the first place. We watch corporations do all the apologia stuff all the time and most of us just roll our eyes. That’s indicative of how skeptical we are of those types of things.
Also, just be aware of where you are online and what types of things people might be saying about you. You can’t rebuild your reputation if you don’t know what people are saying.
The last thing I would say would be to go back to the hallmarks of rhetoric and to think about ethos, pathos, and logos, which are the central pieces of persuasive communication. Ethos is about credibility. Has any response that I have to a character attack on me been a credible answer? It’s very easy to get caught in a lie on social media and so making sure that you present yourself credibly and have, if it’s available, credible evidence is useful. Pathos appealing to emotion and reminding people that you’re a human being is useful, too, and again, logically thinking about building arguments. And so, it’s a different scenario, but the building blocks of rhetoric, I think, help us understand how we can maneuver even in today’s media-saturated society.
WATCH: Effective communication is key to personal, professional growth
Q: You’ve spent time coaching others in speech and debate. What do you think is greatest value of strong debating skills?
A: I 100 percent credit, my participation in debate for getting me to where I am today.
By participating in debate, I learned to write and write quickly, I learned to do research, I learned to be a good public speaker. And it was from teaching debate that I learned that I love to debate, and then followed my way to the comm master’s and Ph.D. and ultimately to directing the digital communication program here at UBalt.
But fundamentally, I think the biggest skill that people can build in debate is learning to see both sides of an issue. I don’t mean, that personal conviction isn’t important, I don’t mean to suggest that there are, in fact, two sides to every issue, and I don’t mean to get into the both side-ism or relativism that I think sometimes creeps into our political discourse today. Your personal convictions are absolutely important, but debate forces you to listen to the other side. By doing that, we learn about the motivations, the values, the personal experiences that people have had that lead them to believe something different than you do.
Fundamentally, I think, it seems sort of counterintuitive, because so many of us understand debate as like you’re taught to attack other people, and you are taught to think strategically and to question, but I think that also helps us do those things for our positions as well. To be able to subject our own beliefs to that same type of critical inquiry makes us better arguers, it makes us more empathetic people, and fundamentally, you know, it forces us to realize that the other side is human, even if we don’t agree with them. That, I think, is something that’s lacking in political discourse today, is the ability to actually treat the people that we’re talking to as people.
Q: When were you first introduced to debate?
A: My high school had a really competitive debate team. And so, a lot of sports and activities in high school, we would sort of pop around to the neighboring high schools go to debate tournaments. There’s also a national circuit of debate, and so if your school has resources, if your team is good and competitive, then you can travel around on the national circuit and meet people from other high schools.
I cannot, for the life of me, tell you what made me go to the debate club meeting my freshman year of high school. I was really shy in middle school. But for some reason, I showed up to the meeting, and it became the place where I spent the most of my time in high school. But I totally credit that for knowing that I wanted to study communication and then ultimately, learn more about strategic communication. None of that would have happened without debate. And it was just seeing a flyer on a wall. This is why I hope that all the flyers we put up at UBalt sway students to come to events and activities because it did it for me in high school, and I could not be more grateful.
What Charms Us
We end all our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Jennifer’s answer.
Even though I live in Washington, D.C., I love so many things about Baltimore. One of the main things I love is local coffee shops, restaurants. D.C. is so corporate sometimes. The second thing I will say is I love baseball and Oriole Park at Camden Yards is one of the best places in the country to watch a baseball game.