ABSTRACT
The last chapter opens with a short account of Held v. Montana: a vivid and timely anecdote representing the potency of rhetorical children beyond our four case studies. The chapter then turns to a summary of our core findings, projecting how rhetorical children can continue to intervene in intractable social challenges. The chapter indexes the dispositional markers accounting for rhetorical children’s potency. Summarizing the case studies, the chapter shows how rhetorical children are hopeful, imaginative, energetic, active, and community focused. The chapter argues it is these synthetic disposition qualities of the rhetorical child that can link agency and voice that endows threatened bodies and urgent voices with ethical and affective inspiration to act. Taken together, the potency of rhetorical children offers lessons for social movement scholars, students, and activists. Rhetorical children affirm and extend the expectations of the epideictic genre and offer a counter-intuitive conception of ethos; rhetorical children can also help discover fresh truth-claims, inform how social movements can ally with historically dominant groups, and provide a model for rehabilitating civic education by affirming the fundamentals of representative democracy. The chapter closes by showing how these lessons offer an attractive and vivid point of contrast to the lingering wounds of the twentieth century.
