Kinetics of Argument: Rhetorical Vorticity of Ethos within COVID-19 Vaccination Narratives
Alexia Charoupa-Sapsis | Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Andreas Karatsolis | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publication: Volume 6 Issue 1
Abstract | During pandemic times, when vaccination-induced herd immunity is presumed as the sole remedy, government officials engage in wide-reaching persuasive moves to promote vaccination. Within this context, governments and government administrators assume the position of persuasive actors, or rhetors, undertaking the major task of mobilizing their entire population to vaccination action, accommodating even citizens skeptical of vaccination requirements. How can, however, the whole population of a country (and the world) be moved into action? Analyzing the rhetorical models that two countries (as rhetors) employed in early 2021, as the world still grappled with a crippling pandemic while vaccines were becoming available, our research argues that this coveted movement to action is primarily achieved through the appeal of ethos. Aristotle himself was singularly concerned with ethos, treating it as “the most important kind of pistis,” that is, means of persuasion. His core understanding of ethos, though, was not merely that of “the most important” but that of the most “authoritative, effective instrument of persuasion”—a nuance that evades translation. In closely rereading and reappraising ethos within a social constructionist framework, we attribute ethos’ dominance over the other appeals, as bestowed by Aristotle himself, to its inherent ability to be reinvented according to the intended audience. We specifically examine the ethical appeals generated in Greece and Israel, two countries with the highest early vaccination rates, as they attempted to motivate their first citizens to be vaccinated against COVID-19. This analysis of ethos as a kinetical, living organism chiseled in and through discourse reframes the traditional approach to a rhetor’s character as a fixed, solid entity into an ongoing, unraveling, happening, and becoming at once, and produces what we call a “rhetorical vorticity of ethos.” The implications of this work are significant for the design of persuasive messages by institutional or government entities to appeal to vast, often negatively predisposed, audiences.
Key words | Ethos, Invented ethos, Situated ethos, Rhetorical Vorticity, Kinetical ethos, Persuasion, Character, Rhetor, Audience, COVID-19, Pandemic, Greece, Israel, Vaccination, Aristotle
Alexia Charoupa-Sapsis (charoupa@mit.edu) is a Research Assistant in the Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at MIT. Her work lies at the interface of Narratology and Rhetoric, focusing on the act of meaning creation for audiences and by audiences. Her research streams include the History of MIT, the harmonic disharmony of stasis and kinesis, kinetical ethos, and the transformative power of narratives in reengineering social perception, personal and communal identities, and collective imagination and behavior in the fields of Politics and Medicine.
Andreas Karatsolis (karatsol@mit.edu) is the Interim Director of WRAP (Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the recipient of MIT’s 2023 Teaching with Digital Technology award. His research and pedagogy lie in the intersection of applied communication and learning engineering, centering around questions of how students develop disciplinary knowledge in Science and Engineering through rhetorical mastery.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Charoupa-Sapsis, Alexia and Andreas Karatsolis. “Kinetics of Argument: Rhetorical Vorticity of Ethos within COVID-19 Vaccination Narratives.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 25 Apr. 2024, pp. 1.1–1.19, https://ellids.com/archives/2024/04/6.1-Sapsis-Karatsolis.pdf.