Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring The Metaphysics Of Grief, Carolyn Garland

Dissertations - ALL

The goal of this dissertation is to develop an understanding of grief utterances: expressions of grief that in losing a loved one, the bereaved lost a part of herself. Grief utterances are commonplace, and their accompanying phenomenology suggests they are true. That gives us reason to think they are true. But if they are, what makes them true? I establish two potential answers to this question, ultimately favoring one according to which when a loved one dies we lose parts of our practical identities.

Chapter One introduces and sets up this topic it. It then focuses on the extent to …

Exploring The Metaphysics Of Grief, Carolyn Garland

Dissertations - ALL

The goal of this dissertation is to develop an understanding of grief utterances: expressions of grief that in losing a loved one, the bereaved lost a part of herself. Grief utterances are commonplace, and their accompanying phenomenology suggests they are true. That gives us reason to think they are true. But if they are, what makes them true? I establish two potential answers to this question, ultimately favoring one according to which when a loved one dies we lose parts of our practical identities.

Chapter One introduces and sets up this topic it. It then focuses on the extent to …

Unearthing Entanglements: Human/Machine Collaboration In The Writing Classroom, Jordan Canzonetta

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the dynamics between teachers and machines at the intersections of design, teaching labor, and pedagogy when automation is deployed in writing classrooms. The sites of analysis are Eli Review and Turnitin, two technologies that represent different design approaches that center around “informating” or “automating” data about student work. The exigence for this project emerges out of the labor crisis currently enveloping higher education. Traditionally, in times of labor crises, automation and machines are used to replace scarce or imperfect human labor. However, balanced and purposeful design of automated technology has the potential to enhance humans’ labor …

All The Small Things: Contingent Mereological Nihilism, Naomi Dershowitz

Dissertations - ALL

Scientists and metaphysicians alike often accept that the best theory is that which best exhibits familiar theoretical virtues such as empirical testability, fruitfulness, conservatism, explanatory power, and parsimony. In this dissertation, I assume this naturalistically respectable methodology and explore whether it can help decide between competing metaphysical theories. I argue it can.

In chapter 1, I present my version of mereological nihilism, Minimal Truthmaker Nihilism (MTN). According to MTN, only the minimal truthmakers for all true sentences are included in the correct ontology and composite objects are not among the minimal truthmakers. I argue that the proponent of MTN can …

The Third World Women’S Alliance: History, Geopolitics, And Form, Ariane Vani Kannan

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: …

Schooled: Hiphop Composition At The Predominantly White University, Tessa Rose Brown

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation asks what hiphop is doing in predominantly white higher-educational contexts, specifically in composition classrooms. Using ethnographic, autoethnographic, and historical methods, it finds that hiphop’s work in composition classrooms at PWIs is contradictory. This mixed-methods investigation suggests that the contradictory relation of white fans, students, and institutions to hiphop is shaped on the one hand by white listeners’ increasing identification with the historical struggles of African Americans under capitalism, and on the other hand, by disidentification or abjectification of African Americans in an effort to “win” the zero-sum game of capitalism. This contradiction results in a paradoxical situation where …

Literacy And Labor: Archives, Networks, And Histories In Working-Class Communities, Jessica Michelle Pauszek

Dissertations - ALL

Literacy and Labor: Archives, Networks, and Histories in Working-Class Communities explores the significance of The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP), a network of writing groups that existed between 1976-2007 and self-published thousands of texts focused on working-class life, immigrant experience, and educational development. The FWWCP emerged in London and eventually spread throughout the United Kingdom and, then, transnationally. Circulating close to one million chapbooks, this network represents years of social history, testimony, and cultural conditions described through the voices of working-class people. I begin by unpacking the historical and social conditions of the FWWCP’s tenure and explain …

Whose Honey, Whose Hive?: Genre And Rhetorical Agency In The U.S. Colony Collapse Disorder, W. Kurt Stavenhagen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the environmental crisis of the honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder, commonly known as CCD. Since 2007, the United States has lost on average a third of its honey bee colonies each year to CCD. The crisis has potentially serious environmental consequences. Without honey bee pollination services, over $14 billion worth of crops in the United States alone are in jeopardy. Drawing on environmental rhetoric, genre theory, and agricultural rhetorics, I offer a rhetorical analysis and genre analysis of the narratives surrounding CCD from select popular press newspaper articles, documentaries, nonfiction works, and personal interviews …

The Epistemologies They Carry: An Investigation Of Feminist Writing Assignments, Kathryn Elizabeth Navickas

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines feminist writing assignments as one pedagogical site that influences students’ engagement and thinking. Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, feminist pedagogy, and composition scholarship on writing assignments, I argue that because writing assignments are genres that position students in particular subjectivities and carry implicit arguments and values, they are texts that should be revised for their theoretical and pedagogical features. The dissertation examines feminist writing assignments in the history of feminist composition scholarship, in a collection of 73 feminist-oriented writing assignments contributed by teachers who self-identified as enacting or being influenced by feminist pedagogy, and in one of …

Seattle, Rhetorical Velocity, Identity Shift, Transnational Politics, And Materiality: Watching Rhetoric Bleed, Brian J. Bailie

Dissertations - ALL

Seattle, Rhetorical Velocity, Identity Shift, Transnational Politics, and Materiality: Watching Rhetoric Bleed examines how the writings of Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos shaped the philosophical underpinnings of the overall 1999 WTO protests, and more specifically, the philosophical underpinnings and the physical experience of one protest group in particular: the Mechistas of Washington State.