November 15, 2016 - DNC2016, Project Rationales, RNC2016
The Star-Spangled study seeks to understand the meaning of important flags in American culture, particularly the national flag and the confederate battle flag. This project is particularly important for three reasons: (1) determining whether and how these flags are deployed in civic discourse, (2) assessing the utility and applicability of theories of “visual argument” to uses of the flag, and (3) determining the legal status of the national flag.
The contentious presidential election has resulted in Donald Trump as president-elect. Trump has used flag rhetoric before, notably in a dispute with the city of Palm Beach over the size of the American flag flying over his Mar-al-Lago estate. (Read a conservative take and a liberal take on the story.) It seems likely that Trump will make patriotic appeals and use flag-inflected rhetoric during his tenure as president. This use of the flag in civic discourse has important implications for how we understand the meaning-making and argumentative potential of symbols. The likely use of the confederate battle flag as a symbol on the periphery of this discourse offers an opportunity to consider a similar symbol but with very different associations for the public and groups within it.
Since the work of Birdsell and Groarke (1996, 2007), theorists have debated whether it is possible to speak of “visual arguments,” that is, purely visual, non-verbal communication that can be reconstructed in the form of the conclusion-support structure of an argument. Fleming (1996) and Johnson (2003) argued that visual arguments are impossible without verbal components. Other theorists maintained that they can reconstruct arguments from images. For example, Pineda and Sowards (2007) considered the use of immigrants waving Mexican and other Latin American flags during protests in 2006. Like most of the other researchers supporting the claim that visual arguments exist, Pineda and Sowards relied heavily on their own reconstructions (or perhaps even imaginings) of the arguments proposed by the flag-waving without consulting those waving the flags. This study extends their work by consulting with the people bearing/wearing the flags in question. It has important implications for how we critique visual communication/arguments.
With Donald Trump’s election, it is possible he will support the constitutional amendment (proposed frequently in Congress since the 1990s) to protect the U.S. flag from desecration. Since the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in the Eichmann case, the law of the land is that flag desecration cannot be criminally punished. The flag protection amendment would permit Congress to impose criminal penalties for flag desecration. (See accounts from the ACLU and The Citizens Flag Alliance.) In the years since 1990, however, the public’s uses of the flag have changed. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was regarded as desecration at worst and counter-cultural at best to wear flag clothing. By the 1990s, however, we can observe a growing trend for flag motifs in clothing, including American flag underwear, flip-flops, bikinis, etc. An important question in understanding these uses of the flag is whether those wearing it do so with particular messages in mind and whether they contemplate their wearing of the flag as honoring or desecrating it. The answer to these questions would certainly influence flag-protection policy in the event a flag-protection amendment passes.
Brian Larson attended the RNC and DNC in July 2016. He identified people wearing clothing, footwear, or headgear, or carrying bags or other products with depictions of American flags or parsed flags on them. Parsed flags are reconfigured elements of the flag, such as an athletic uniform that has “white stars on a blue field draping one arm, and red stripes draping the other” (Marvin and Ingle, 305). The goal was to speak to as many potential participants as possible during the applicable events. After inviting participants to be interviewed and presenting them IRB-required disclosures, Larson took at least one photo (and sometimes as many as five) of the person bearing the flag image and interviewed the participant.
As of the date of this post, Larson and Belmas have removed personally identifying information from the photo images gathered at the political conventions and posted the images on this site. Next steps include completing and proofreading transcriptions of the interviews and analyzing the data. There are more photos to be uploaded, too, in conjunction with detailed descriptions of the visual context in which these participants carried or wore their flag images.
Birdsell, D. S., & Groarke, L. (1996). Toward a theory of visual argument. Argumentation and Advocacy, 33(1), 1.
Birdsell, D. S., & Groarke, L. (2007). Outlines of a theory of visual argument. Argumentation and Advocacy, 43(3-4), 103–113.
Fleming, D. (1996). Can pictures be arguments? Argumentation & Advocacy, 33(1), 11.
Johnson, R. H. (2003). Why “Visual Arguments” aren’t Arguments. In OSSA 5 “Informal Logic at 25” (p. 13). Windsor, ON, Canada: Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. Retrieved from http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA5/papersandcommentaries/49/
Marvin, C., & Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood sacrifice and the nation: totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pineda, R. D., & Sowards, S. K. (2007). Flag waving as visual argument: 2006 immigration demonstrations and cultural citizenship. Argumentation & Advocacy, 43(3/4), 164–174.
