Prof. Endres's research being published
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.”
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/.