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Mission As Virtuous Practice: A Theology Of Mission Through The Lens Of Virtue Ethics, Michael Niebauer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work uses theological virtue ethics as a guide both for critiquing various models of Christian mission and for constructing a model of mission that adequately addresses these criticisms. The first section of the dissertation (chapters one, two, and three) is devoted to an assessment of three major models of mission, which I have labeled mission as the missio Dei, mission as growth, and mission as dialogue. This assessment generates three recurring issues within the field of missiology that have remained largely unresolved: the problems of distinction, agency, and persuasion. The second half of the dissertation (chapters four, five, …

Bureaucratic Modernity And The Erosion Of Practical Reason: A Rhetorical Education As An Antidote, David Impellizzeri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To what extent and in what ways does modernity reveal itself through the bureaucratic? This project aims at an interpretive understanding of bureaucratic modernity. The rationalization of society and action in the (late) modern world requires that an increasing number of human activities and domains be explained in allegedly neutral, ‘rational’ terms and without reference to morally substantive ends. Ultimately, this entails a form of epistemic reductionism that elevates instrumental rationality to the exclusion of practical reason and probabilistic ways of knowing. Bureaucratic modernity signifies a decrease in choices that can be legitimized in public on some basis other …

A New Materialist Rhetoric: Theorizing Movement From A Rhetorical Ethnography Of Hiking, Bryan Picciotto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the field of rhetoric, conventional concepts of movement depend on dialectical theories of materiality that posit matter is not rhetorical until acted upon by human sign or symbol systems. New materialist philosophy, which considers the dynamism of matter without situating materiality in dialectical relationship to language, provides a theoretical context for reconceptualizing the rhetoricity of movement. Working from a nondialectical approach to materiality, this dissertation theorizes how movement functions rhetorically, specifically within cultural practices of hiking. For this project, I participated in 15+ hikes at state and national parks in Maine, and generated a multimodal archive of 1,000+ audio, …

"Prejudice": The Impact On Dialogic Communication Ethics, Cyril Latzoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work seeks to elaborate upon the contributions of dialogic communication ethics to a rhetorical understanding of prejudice. The aim is to address the problematic nature of ethical rhetoric apropos of dialogic communication, arguing that there are contending views in the community of memory, and that prejudice is an integral aspect of dialogic communication ethics. Drawing upon Arnett’s concept of dialogic ethics, I argue that there is need for a “dialogic turn” towards the notion of prejudice in the postmodern era. I begin by looking at Chesebro (1969), Arnett (1987), Johannesen (2001), and Arnett, Arneson and Bell (2006) to advance …

When Humanity Meets Technology: Contemplating Neil Postman's Critique Of Advertising, Yingwen Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to contemplate Postman’s critique of advertising and offer insights to understand Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) in today’s mediated environment. As an essential component of IMC, the history of advertising demonstrates and documents that the medium of communication has an extensive influence on IMC practices. The concern about how communication media affect human perception, understanding, and behavior, resides within the central claim of the study of media ecology. Thus, this project investigates IMC through the lens of Postman’s media ecology perspectives, and argues that Postman’s prescient ideas provide both hope and constructive insights. Moreover, Postman’s thermostatic perspective, rooted …

Video Games, Influence, And Identification: The Perpetuation Of Culture Through Digital Worlds, Steven Zwier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video games, through their widespread popularity and appeal, transmit meaningful ideas, beliefs, and attitudes via the use of digital worlds, narratives, characters, and play. Play has always held a key role in human life, but the video game medium accentuates and accelerates the reach and impact of play on human users. Jacques Ellul’s philosophy of social propaganda and Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory each offer important implications to the persuasiveness of video games; however, when placed in conversation with one another, the union of Ellul and Burke leads to a more complete understanding of how video games have such an effect …

The Ethics Of Occultic Communication: An Invocation Of Joshua Gunn And Sissela Bok, James Thomas Begley Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works …

A Praxis Of Oral Homiletics: Preaching From The Heart, Weiwen Tu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian preaching has been a central and significant custom to the practitioners of biblically confessional and creedal communities in worship, evangelization, and discipleship. Yet modern preachers confront two challenges presented by the New Homiletic and the media environment. Undue favor toward narrative-based form, audience-oriented eventfulness at the expense of biblical authority, and shifting media that alter the preacher’s identity and incapacitate the preacher’s orality have led to a dissonant handling of form and content and thus a profound decline in the quality of the Christian pulpit.

This project grows out of an attempt to integrate an Augustinian hermeneutic and homiletic, …

Reclaiming Rhetorical Intersectionality: From Silence To Parrhesia And Attuned Listening, Tahirah Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intersectionality is a term applied by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s to a social experience. A person experiences intersectionality when different aspects of her identity converge in a way that causes uniquely amplified marginalization or oppression. The classic three identities that produce intersectionality experiences in the United States are race, gender, and class, making poor women of color the central figures of intersectionality study. Crenshaw explained that these forces take three main forms: structural, political and representational (“Mapping the Margins” 1243).

Intersectionality has always been rhetorical. Structural, political and representational intersectionality are supported in language. The power of …

A Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Interprofessional Healthcare Education: Communication Ethics In Action, Matthew Corr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare professionals belong to a moral community. Caring for patients is a community act carried out by healthcare professionals working in teams within complex political and organizational systems. This teamwork is crucial to quality patient outcomes; however, incivility threatens to derail necessary and effective collaboration towards the common organizational good. Necessarily, interprofessional healthcare education is becoming a required element for pre-health professionals. Currently, schools are using competency-based approaches to interprofessional education to teach ethics/values, roles/responsibilities. communication, and teamwork. For reasons explicated throughout this dissertation, the categorizing of these particular elements as competencies is problematic and cultivated within a positivistic and …

The Emergent Matter Of Archives : A Rhetorical Investigation Of The Queer Formation Of The Williams-Nichols Archive., Richard Wysocki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly conversations across disciplines have asked researchers to consider archive as a site of power—often framed in terms of archives’ potential impact on history and practices of knowledge making more generally. This dissertation contributes to such conversations as they relate to queer archives and material rhetoric, exploring the Williams-Nichols Archive, an LGBTQ archive housed at the University of Louisville. I extend interdisciplinary scholarship to argue for approaching archives as rhetorical emergences rather than as containers or locations for discovery, a perspective that foregrounds the archive and archival practices as the subject of research. Drawing on archival research and oral history …

When Process Becomes Processing: Managing Instructor Response To Student Disclosure Of Trauma In The Composition Classroom, Kelci Barton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Dominating The Disease: A Transnational Feminist Perspective Of U.S. Health Coloniality, Jessica Ann Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

HIV has been a pandemic since the 1980s with 70 million people infected since the beginning, about 35 million people have died of complications resulting from HIV, and an estimated 36.9 million people living with HIV in 2017 (WHO, "HIV and AIDS"). Many organizations around the world have tried to tackle this issue, however most of these organizations are based in the West or have Western organizations holding the majority of power and control. People in these organizations have the intention of ending the spread of HIV, but they also sometimes spread Western ideology.

This work brings together communication scholarship …