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Prof. Endres's research being published

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Danielle Endres, Associate Professor of Communication at the U, will have her research published in Argumentation and Advocacy’s Winter 2014 issue. Dr. Endres worked alongside her co-authors, Samantha Senda-Cook, a 2010 Ph.D. alum of the U’s Department of Communication, and Brian Cozen, a current Ph.D. student in the department to publish their paper titled “Not Just a Place to Park Your Car: PARK(ing) as Spatial Argument.”

Their research theorizes how place/space can be an argument in itself, as opposed to traditional scholarship that only considers verbal, visual, and bodily arguments. This new way of thinking reveals how many social movements can use place/space as part of their message (to supplement or add to the verbal message), and explains how many social movements negotiate a tension between ephemeral (or short-lived) events and more enduring long term consistency in messaging.

The researchers based their study on a 2005 art installation that transformed a leased parking space into a temporary park, referred to as PARK(ing) Day. When the image disseminated online, it sparked a global movement to rethink urban space. They argue the PARK(ing) Day movement enacts a spatial argument at the intersection of localized PARK(ing) installations in particular places and the dissemination of the concept of PARK(ing) Day in online spaces. Endres et. al’s study shows how residual traces of temporary installations exist in online spaces that shape the broad dissemination and development of this movement and its message, which then influence the construction of PARK(ing) installations. In exploring this play between place and space, endurance and ephemerality, they highlight how the movement constrains and enables the tactical deployment of PARK(ing) installations as spatial arguments.

“This was an excellent chance to further test and refine the research that Samantha Senda-Cook and I did on place in protest in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2009,” Endres said. “When we learned about PARK(ing) Day from Brian Cozen, we realized it was a perfect case for further developing our thinking about how place/space act rhetorically and argumentatively. Though we don’t draw on it in the article, we all participated in some of the PARK(ing) Day events that have happened in Salt Lake and Ohama. We also spent some time at PARKlets in San Francisco. Having this experience deepened our ability to understand and examine the PARK(ing) Day movement.”

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Endres, Senda-Cook and Cozen’s article is slated for Volume 50, Issue 3, Winter 2014 of Argumentation and Advocacy. For more info on PARK(ing) Day, which happens every year on the third Friday in September, visit  http://parkingday.org/.

Last Updated: 9/20/21