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All That Is Cyber Melts Into Control: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Cybernetic Metaphors, Cem İsmail Addemir

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis historicizes and interprets the logic of cybernetics as a communication technology and how it shaped notions of control in the mid-20th century. To situate my analysis, I focus on cybernetics, the tradition within communication studies that focuses on controlling communication through the application of feedback loops to a particular system. Since the discovery and popularization of cybernetics by the late 1950s, its central logic has been widely applied to computational technology and influenced future systems theories. Specifically, my thesis employs a rhetorical examination of cybernetic metaphors through metaphor criticism to trace the genealogy of cybernetic discourses that I …

Saying Way More Than Gay: Polarized Adoption Of Ultimate Terms In U.S. Legislation, Shelby E. Limbach

Theses and Dissertations

Due to rampant political polarization in the United States this thesis investigated the role of language in perpetuating opposing ideologies. A critical rhetorical cluster analysis of Florida’s House Bill 1557, political rhetoric, and public discourse reveals the contemporary power of ultimate terms. Within the United States terms such as “parental rights” and “Don’t Say Gay” operate to further divisive discourses due to their simultaneous perceptions as god and devil terms. In the United States such buzzwords are associated with vastly different valences dependent on individual ideological value systems, which often correlate with one’s political affiliations. Existing scholarship on the ideograph …

Community-Based Risk Communication During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Biwoc Framework, Raven Latice Preston

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis explores the impact of COVID-19 on marginalized communities, particularly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and the disparities in risk communication that affect them. The author argues that traditional risk communication practices are often hegemonic and fail to consider the embodied experiences of marginalized communities. The thesis proposes a framework, Cooperative Risk Communication, that values Black Feminist and intersectional experiences to inform risk communication measures as an extension of institutional communication. Highlighting environmental and medical racism as factors that contribute to the vulnerability of BIPOC communities to COVID-19 and other diseases. The thesis concludes that culturally competent …

I Got Two Versions: Frank Ocean, Lil Nas X, And The Rhetoric Of Progressive Masculinity In Rap Music, Evan William Lobdell

Theses and Dissertations

Rap music serves as one of the most popular genres of music worldwide. Despite its popularity and influence, the genre has often been criticized for its inclusion of misogyny and homophobia. Frank Ocean and Lil Nas X, two Black queer male rappers, are introducing a new style of masculinity to the genre that is centered on a blurring of the masculine and feminine. Through a rhetorical analysis of the lyrics, music videos, and live performances of “Nikes” by Frank Ocean and “Industry Baby” by Lil Nas X, this thesis characterizes progressive masculinity, its impact on understandings of masculinity in rap, …

Make America Kill Again: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Donald Trump’S Necropolitical Representations Through Conjunctural Use Of Twitter During His Presidency, Zach Thornhill

Theses and Dissertations

The presidency of Donald Trump set the stage for new forms of rhetoric that shaped national perceptions of different groups. Operating in different conjunctural moments, Trump used his Twitter account as a weapon to repetitively vilify different racial identities. Through negative representations of Black Lives Matter protestors and immigrants, Trump created a culture of incivility and hatred. Using these negative representations, Trump created necropolitical conditions that justified violence in the United States. This thesis will be a critical discourse analysis that examines how Trump was able to create the culture of incivility during his presidency.KEYWORDS: conjuncture, necropolitics, representations, rhetoric, nationalism

The Pen Is The Sword: Fighting By Writing For Our Future, Clinton Alexander Soper

Theses and Dissertations

76 pages

Suffering from a personal crisis of passivity in his teaching of writing and personal composition in the public sphere, Soper looks for inspiration and guidance through a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiry into the disciplines of composition, teaching high school English Language Arts, and practicing Kendo, the Japanese Way of the Sword. Soper reflects not only on his personal crisis borne of the socio-political landscape of the current moment but calls for and promotes a redemption of our public discourse in the interest of battling our shared exigencies: the dual-crises of trust in our democratic institutions and our global …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Higher Education’S Mental Health Messaging, Gabrielle Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

In 2017, SAMHSA reported that nearly 20% of the American population have been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder. College aged students are within the age group most likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness (SAMHSA, 2017), making mental health services and promotions on college campuses a necessity. Because of the current mental health crisis affecting students, this research aimed to investigate the mental health messages higher education institutions produce for their students. Using close textual analysis, mental health materials in the form of flyers, social media posts, websites, and syllabi from 11 universities and colleges were …

Interrogating Digital Rhetorical Privacy On Direct-To-Consumer Genetics Websites, Charles Fletcher Woods

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses an intersectional feminist methodology and digital rhetorical analysis to examine data related to direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetics websites. This work seeks to better understand how rhetorical power is distributed asymmetrically through the use of DTC-genetics and through the privacy policies which prescribe user actions on the sites. I detail and advocate for digital rhetorical privacy (DRP), a state of being when a user is confidant their digital data is free from unauthorized observances by nefarious computer technologies and other users. Through analysis I demonstrate that using DTC-genetics technology for police surveillance is an unethical action and a violation …

An Intersectional Feminist Rhetorical Reframing Of Rhetorics Of Efficiency Within Public Policy: Embodied Knowledge And Usability, Oriana A. Gilson

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on public policies that are presented under the pretext that they benefit all members of society but that in fact reserve those privileges for those who conform to reductive policy mandates. Specifically, this project employs an intersectional feminist rhetorical methodology that is committed to identifying and challenging exclusionary rhetorics of efficiency and propelling the agentive power of those whose embodied realities places them outside of the normative user-group imagined by, and constructed through, a specific policy. This dissertation begins with a synthesis of scholarship that is key to the theorization and application of an intersectional feminist rhetorical, …

Trauma And The Credibility Economy: An Analysis Of Epistemic Violence And Its Traumatic Functions, Gina Stinnett

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that the work done in philosophy on epistemic injustice can put pressure on the assumptions driving the work of both trauma theory and rhetorical theory. In addition to arguing how epistemic injustice can reinforce trauma, I argue that epistemic injustice has its own power to traumatize. I refer to this as “epistemic trauma,” or a trauma to one’s ability to know their experience and to make a claim based on this knowledge. Research on epistemic injustice states that when one encounters repeated epistemic injustice, they become less likely to share their experiences at all—they fall …

Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening Up Possibilities For Chronic Pain In Disability Rhetoric And Rhetoric And Composition, Hilary Selznick

Theses and Dissertations

In the dissertation “Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening up Possibilities for Chronic Pain in Disability Rhetoric and Rhetoric and Composition,” Hilary Selznick argues that pain is rhetorical, accessible, and communicable to those without the lived experience of chronic pain. Additionally, she argues for the necessity of considering chronic pain as a disability and not merely as a symptom of a disability. In order to make these arguments possible, Selznick crafts a political-relational-rhetorical methodology that challenges restrictive models of disability and theoretical and commonplace assumptions that pain is resistant to language. Specifically, Selznick’s methodology, which combines disability scholar and activist Alison …

Believing Mary Karr, Stephanie Rae Guedet

Theses and Dissertations

Believing Mary Karr examines how belief, represented in the memoirs of Mary Karr, works in our contemporary moment. This examination is supported by the argument that our identities and the stories we tell about them are always constructions of belief, and that these beliefs are ultimately relational, enacted in the intersubjective relationship between writers and readers of autobiography. This dissertation provides the fields of both rhetoric and life writing studies not only an awareness of how ideas about belief—how beliefs about belief—have already shaped our scholarly imagination but also the possibilities a rhetoric of belief can offer to future conversations …

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Mass Media’S Cultivation Effect On Islamic, Muslim, And Qur’Anic Prejudice, Shanna J. Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the power of the mass media’s ability to cultivate reality in terms of the threat of Islam. A rhetorical analysis of the messages portrayed by the mass media is then compared to the findings of the study. While the study did not find any significant correlation between consumption of media and fear of Muslims, the Qur’an, or Islam, it did find a strong negative correlation between inter-group contact and salience of stereotypes.

Ideographs And American Mass Media: Understanding The Narrative On The Israel-Palestine Conflict And Its Influence On Publics, Savanna Lynn Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired …

Rhetorics Of Engagement Across And About Faith And Worldview Difference, John Maclean

Theses and Dissertations

Interactions across faith and worldview difference are becoming increasingly common in many communities and around the world. These interactions can be verbally or physically violent, and even deadly, or they can be beautiful and enriching, or they can be ignored, resisted or refused. In this dissertation I put scholarship that endorses a broader conception of rhetoric in conversation with my personal experience in interfaith relations and dialogue in order to discover better ways to study these interactions. I propose and develop two constructs, "rhetorical space" and "rhetorical stance", that I use to explore and analyze people's attitudes toward and experiences …

Crime And Poverty In Detroit: A Cross-Referential Critical Analysis Of Ideographs And Framing, Jacob Jerome Nickell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the relationship between crime and poverty is rhetorically constructed within the news media. To this end, I investigate the content of twelve news articles, published online, that offered coverage of crime in the city of Detroit, Michigan. I employ three methods in my criticism of these texts: ideographic analysis, critical framing analysis, and an approach that considers ideographs and framings elements to be rhetorical constructions that function together. In each phase of my analysis, I developed ideological themes from concepts emerging from the texts. I then approached my discussion of these findings from a perspective of …

Fashioning A Rhetoric Of Style: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Urban Street Style Representations In New York City, Amber Pineda

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how urban street styles are used rhetorically within local boroughs in New York City as a form of resistance to the dominant fashion industry that dictates what is "in fashion" through media. A total of fifteen video blogs developed by The New York Times were analyzed, each containing a representation of one of the five boroughs of New York City: Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens. The analysis identified themes of a rhetoric of style, consisting of primacy of text, imaginary communities, aesthetic rationales, market contexts, and stylistic homologies. These themes were then analyzed by drawing …

Hegemonic Resistance In Hip-Hop Music: A Gramscian Rhetorical Criticism Of Tupac Shakur, Scott Andrew Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the rhetorical elements in the work of Tupac Shakur that provide the capacity for resistance against hegemonic conditions of oppression. A popular, socially-conscious rapper of the 1980s and 1990s, Shakur's music opened a window not only for others to understand the social injustices facing Black Americans, but provided Blacks living in conditions of poverty and oppression with a voice in society. Using a Gramscian lens of rhetorical criticism, this study examines the neo-marxist elements of hegemonic structure present in select tracks produced during Shakur's lifetime. This analysis explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Shakur to bring awareness …