Political Communication

On December 4, 2024, news broke that a lone gunman had assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive officer, Brian Thompson, outside the company’s headquarters.1 The killing itself was shocking, but what unsettled many observers was the wave of sympathy that quickly coalesced around the perpetrator—donations, online tributes, and statements of support that revealed a raw seam in America’s collective experience of health care.2 This dramatic act of killing is entangled with the dark trajectory in the devolution of the marketized healthcare industry in the United States: normalizing traumatic acts of takings, with increasingly unsustainable industry practices justifying the suspension of pre-existing taboos concerning the sanctity of life and the boundaries of wealth transfer.3 ...

Lesson Module by Keren Wang, updated 4 Nov 2025. This lesson module examines the contested and ambivalent relationship between media and violence from historical and transnational perspectives. 1. Violence as Ritual & Power: Historical and Global Perspectives Let's open this session with a reference from Greek mythology: consider the telltale of Prometheus, whose theft of fire from the Olympian gods for humanity’s benefit inadvertently brought both civilization and destruction. Like Prometheus’s fire, the development of media technology simultaneously brings enlightenment and cataclysm. 1.1 Rhetorical Artifacts and Human Sacrifice The history of the development of writing technology overlaps with the history of war propaganda and human sacrifice.[1] As early as the Narmer Palette, one of the earliest hieroglyphic artifacts ever found from circa 3200 BCE depicting scenes of conquest and violence: Similarly, during the height of the Chinese Bronze Age, also known as the Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1046 BC) produced ritual bronze artifacts at monumental proportions -- such as the 833 kg (1,836 lbs) Houmuwu Ding -- one of the heaviest bronze vessel from the ancient world -- and the 13-foot (3.96 m) tall Sanxingdui bronze tree (c. 1200 BC): ...

I am delighted to announce the publication of my latest article, “Legal and Ritualological Dynamics of Personalized ‘Pillars of Shame’ in Chinese Social Credit System Construction," featured in the latest issue of The China Review (Vol. 24, No. 3). This work explores the intersection of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) with the Confucian ritual legal tradition and the rhetoric of public shaming. It integrates insights from rhetorical studies and philosophy of law to examine how the SCS operates as both a governance-by-data experiment and a framework that aligns with—and diverges from—domestic and transnational constitutional norms. ...

(December 2nd, 2019) I am very pleased to announce that my academic monograph with Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group has now been published: Keren Wang, Legal and Rhetorical Foundations of Economic Globalization: An Atlas of Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism. It is available in both hardback and digital formats. This book was developed from my doctoral dissertation, “Three Studies of Ritual Sacrifice in Late Capitalism.” I would like to extend my special thanks to Stephen H. Browne, my dissertation supervisor, and to members of my dissertation advising committee: Larry Catá Backer, Kirt H. Wilson, and Jeremy David Engels. This project would not have been possible without their guidance and mentorship. I would also like to express my gratitude to members of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University for their generous, ongoing support of my Ph.D. study and related postdoctoral research. ...