Table of Contents What Do You See? Historical "Thickness" of Advertising Demonstrative and Associative Ads Advertising & Consumer Psychology Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects Social Marketing & Exploitation Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization What Do You See? Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of? ...
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’m excited to share that I was recently featured on Free City Radio in an in-depth conversation about my research on the concept of human sacrifice in capitalism. The interview, now available on SoundCloud, is part of an interview series that examines the foundational realities of modern-day capitalism, specifically shaped by the notion of human sacrifice as a necessary element of economic systems. Here’s a link to the interview: Author Keren Wang on Human Sacrifice as Inherent to Capitalism Today. During this conversation, I explore how this framework, traditionally viewed through ancient rituals, continues in modern contexts through the exploitation of labor, environmental destruction, and systemic injustices. ...
"Reexamining Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism" Presentation at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists (SASP) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Building on my doctoral dissertation, I have been exploring the rhetorical inventions of "sacrifice" in the construction and ordering of societal institutions. The rhetoric of sacrifice, and its public rituals, form a core practice of all social orders. Though the practices have become substantially more subtle and even more deeply embedded in everyday social practices and expectations, this research project explores the underlying local and trans-cultural reflexes inherent in the performance of social, political, and economic sacrifices, and their connections to the organization of public institutions. Indeed, the fundamental presumption of sacrifice - the bargaining between unequal powers for the purchase of objectives by the offering of items precious to the giver - has often become so embedded to tacit social norms as to become effectively invisible. Though this project focuses on its connection to the organization of what is termed "late capitalism," its insinuation in all social orderings is hard to ignore. "Civilized" societies and economic relations are ordered through the rituals of sacrifice - propitiation for whatever totems and taboos are set above the governance orders around which collectives coalesce. ...
(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. ...
I am happy to report that my recent article, “The Rhetorical Invention of Laws of Sacrifice: Kelo v. New London,” has just been published and appears in Communication Law Review, Volume 18, Issue 2 (2018): 58-94. My thanks to Dr. Pat Arneson (Chief Editor) for her valuable editorial contribution towards this publication. The article continues my broader work exploring the concept of sacrifice as a useful concept for thinking about how violent transactions are rhetorically justified. The abstract follows. An online version of the article may be accessed HERE. ...
This presentation highlights a few key excerpts from my doctoral dissertation research: “The ritual taking of things that are of human value, including the ritual killing of humans, has been continuously practiced for as long as human civilization itself has existed. Sacrifices in the form of state-organized rituals have been observed in many societies throughout history. Existing scholarship also observed an interdependent relationship between ritual sacrifice and the maintenance of political power in a broad set of historical cases, ranging from Shang dynasty China in 10th century BCE to the witch-hunts in early modern Europe. Sacrificial rituals of the past should not be considered fundamentally divorced from our modern world: whereas the formal elements of sacrifice of the past may no longer be recognizable, their substantive political functions do remain, with rhetorical overtones that carry into the politics of the present time. The goal for this project is to give due consideration to the politics of sacrificial rites across a broad set of political-theological traditions, hopefully paving the way to a new unifying understanding of sacrificial rhetorics. This research goal revolves around two primary research tasks that are intimately connected. The first is to provide a working interpretative framework for understanding the politics of ritual sacrifice – one that not only accommodates multidisciplinary, intersectional knowledge of ritual practices, but that can also be usefully employed in the integrated analysis of sacrificial rituals as political rhetoric under divergent historical and societal contexts. The second conducts a series of case studies that cuts across the wide variability of ritual public takings in late-capitalism.” ...