Amardo Rodriguez, a professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the ’ Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and a Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor Emeritus, has authored the book “Notes From the Margins: Reflections on Regimes of Knowledge and Power” (Public Square Press), which focuses on knowledge, knowledge workers and the enterprise of knowledge.
Amardo Rodriguez
“The knowledge enterprise in the Western/European world assumes a relationship between knowledge and prosperity; supposedly the more knowledge we create and disseminate, the more prosperity we will achieve,” writes Rodriguez. “In this book I look critically at the making, working and propagating of this knowledge enterprise, especially the training and qualifying of knowledge workers, the practices and apparatuses that constitute academic excellence and, finally, the implications and consequences of this enterprise in terms of intensifying a new colonialism.”
Rodriguez’s research and teaching interests revolve around three questions: (a) How can communication theory speak better to what being human means?; (b) How can communication theory offer new vistas of what being human means?; and (c) How can communication theory make for a world with less misery and suffering? He forwards an emergent understanding of communication that foregrounds moral, existential and spiritual assumptions and explores the potentiality of this emergent understanding of communication to expand our notions of democracy and community.
