Digital Commons Network^™

Force Displacement, Forced Perspective: The Rhetorics Of Refugee Experience, Jonathan Burgess

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This dissertation interrogates the intersection of digital media, displacement, and human rights within the contemporary geopolitical landscape, with a specific focus on the MENA region. From a perspective firmly rooted rhetoric, it dissects the complex relationship between technology and displaced populations, emphasizing the role of transmedia storytelling in shaping refugee experiences and narratives and the potential for transmedia storytelling to facilitate greater insights into needs and gaps for displaced people. Central to the analysis is the paradox of digital tools both as emancipatory devices and tools of surveillance and control, which are further elucidated through case studies.

Engaging with thinkers …

Trash, Fragments, And Breaking Things: Toward A Grotesque Cripistemology For Disabled Life Writing, Michelle Anne Lloyd

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Despite the boom of memoirs of mental health post-1997 and the first advertisements for Prozac, most of them follow the same formula and come from the same places of privilege. This privilege is evident in the author bios on the books themselves and the careers of the writers. The popularity of these books within both abled and disabled realms has therefore created a script that those with mental illnesses are expected to abide by. Following in the example of Margaret Price, Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Merri Lisa Johnson, and others, I resituate mental illness as mental disability and place it …

The Myth Of Perfection: Charting The Rhetoric Of Veteran Disability For A Course To Stability, Nicholas Rader

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This dissertation rhetorically analyzes discrimination in Western institutional discourses and documentation procedures, such as architectural texts and procedures, through a historiographic lens. An analytical methodology will be offered to show how discrimination of intersectional bodies is historically informed and reaffirmed by the manipulation of Western myths and mythos. Specifically, by mapping navigational mathematics and cartographic methods over rhetorical, architectural, and historiographic theory, it will be shown how the manipulation of Western myths establishes and reifies patriarchal discrimination that eventually fissions into eugenicist logics in nineteenth and twentieth century France, England, and the United States. In modernity, the practice of manipulating …

Inventing Network Composition: Mobilizing Rhetorical Invention And Social Media For Digital Pedagogy, Jacob Richter

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Inventing Network Composition: Mobilizing Rhetorical Invention and Social Media for Digital Pedagogy investigates how students learn through writing and invention in digital social networks. Pursuing a primary research question of How do student composers invent within networked social media environments?, the dissertation examines how social media and digital writing tools can help students to learn, connect, and share generatively. The core theoretical contribution that this dissertation offers is a theory of network composition, which is a mode of invention that composers engage in social media environments that is intensely social, that is structured by a digital interface, that …

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

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Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

Walking Back The System Trope: Reimagining Incarceration And The State Through A Spatial Theory Approach, Cody Hunter

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This dissertation critiques the systems theory approach to incarceration policy, practice, and research and proposes a rhetorically informed spatial theory approach as an alternative. Offering a non-hierarchical complexity theory as a bridge between systems and space, I then integrate rhetorical listening as a strategy for navigating and operationalizing our proposed spatial theory approach. I then apply our proposed methodology to archival research, focusing on the South Carolina Penitentiary as a case study, and offer two heuretic experiments to explore the range of this methodology for archival research. I also explore potential applications of this rhetorically informed spatial theory approach in …

Princesses, Divas, And Mother Runners: Gendered Institutional And Vernacular Rhetorics In Running Events, Stacy Cacciatore

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This project studies at the intersection of gender, rhetoric, and running, examining, in particular, the way rhetorics are gendered in institutional and vernacular spaces surrounding coed and women’s running events. It asks: In what ways are rhetorics of coed and women’s running events gendered? What are the similarities and differences between institutional and vernacular rhetorics in these events? How are rhetorics in virtual events gendered digitally? Conducting a rhetorical analysis of institutional and vernacular rhetorics offers new perspectives on women’s lived experiences and provides a deeper understanding of gendered rhetorics in women’s running events. Princesses, Divas, and Mother Runners: Gendered …

Reading Memory: A Dual Heuristic Method For Interpreting Rhetorical Architectural Memory Texts, Diane Quaglia Beltran

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Memorials operate rhetorically, architecturally, and spatially as a written mode of remembrance. The rhetorical potential of memory texts has been discussed in rhetorical theory and includes the idea that the monuments and memorials are conveying something to someone for the purpose of influencing memory and remembrance of a place, person, or event. Still what makes them public, rhetorical, and architectural is not as clearly defined, so understanding only what the objects are saying and to whom misses the opportunity to more fully understand the ways in which they are rhetorical and architectural: rhetorical in their epideictic functions and kairotic possibilities, …

Dramatistic User Experience Design: The Usability Testing Of An E-Government System In A Non-Western Setting, Octaviyanti Dwi Wahyurini

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This dissertation investigates rhetorical situatedness as a factor that culturally designates users’ motives in adopting a new technology. The application of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism extends the discussion about the situation where an interaction takes place to include acting and meaning-making in Non-Western settings as contextual and situated. This expansion is essential to reinforce the understanding of how cultural contexts impact users’ motives, specifically users from Non-Western settings, to adopt a technology. The traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research stresses mechanical and technical aspects between a user (agent) and a technology device (agency) in order to reduce user errors. This approach isolates …

Rhetorical Invention In A 21st Century Technoculture: A New Ludic Framework For Learning, Christopher Michael Stuart

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This dissertation proposes the ludic framework for learning as an innovative pedagogical model that privileges play, possibility, failure, and social affinity as states of being and positions for learning. The ludic framework works through rhetorics of play as a frame of reference; rhetorics of possibility and invention as a means of production; the acceptance of transformative failure; and engages with digital communities to further knowledge through social affinity while being grounded in constructionist learning theories. The principles that facilitate this are: curiosity, play, flexibility, metacognition, collaboration, invention, persistence, and creativity. To demonstrate this, the dissertation has two case studies: a …

A Rhetoric Of Resentment: Dismantling White Supremacy Through Definition, Scholarship, And Action, Whitney Jordan Adams

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A Rhetoric of Resentment: Dismantling White Supremacy through Definition, Scholarship, and Action examines the role that Confederate symbolism and ideology has in informing both white supremacist and resentment rhetoric. Using a recently published alt-right text for analysis, I trace how groups affiliated with the alt-right use their version of rhetoric to keep and garner followers. I argue that this rhetoric can be dismantled not only though scholarship, but also through positive pedagogical disturbance, rhetorical listening, and action in the classroom and community. The academic and social outcomes of this dismantling result a New Dialogic pedagogy, a form of Anti-Racist Pedagogy, …

Persuasive Intelligence: On The Construction Of Rhetor-Ethical Cognitive Machines, Nathan D. Riggs

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This work concerns the rhetorical and moral agency of machines, offering paths forward in machine ethics as well as problematizing the issue through the development and use of an interdisciplinary framework informed by rhetoric, philosophy of mind, media studies and historical narrative. I argue that cognitive machines of the past as well as those today, such as rapidly improving autonomous vehicles, are unable to make moral decisions themselves foremost because a moral agent must first be a rhetorical agent, capable of persuading and of being persuaded. I show that current machines, artificially intelligent or otherwise, and especially digital computers, are …

Prisons, Genres, And Big Data: Understanding The Language Of Corrections In America's Prisons, Eric Stephens

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This dissertation seeks to answer one fundamental question: How can I as a researcher conduct social justice research that is ethical, durable, and portable? As social justice research becomes more prominent in the field of technical and professional communication, ethical research practices must be maintained to avoid an unintentional wounding of the subjects for whom researchers hope to advocate. The dissertation is divided into five sections, each written as a stand-alone article that builds on the principles of the section before it. Each section addresses a key question:

1) How do I ethically engage in social justice research?

2) How …

Seriously Playful And Playfully Serious: The Helpfulness Of Humorous Parody, Michael Richard Lucas

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In the following work I create and define the parameters for a specific form of humorous parody. I highlight specific problematic narrative figures that circulate the public sphere and reinforce our serious narrative expectations. However, I demonstrate how critical public pedagogies are able to disrupt these problematic narrative expectations. Humorous parodic narratives are especially equipped to help us in such situations when they work as a critical public/classroom pedagogy, a form of critical rhetoric, and a form of mass narrative therapy. These findings are supported by a rhetorical analysis of these parodic narratives, as I expand upon their ability to …

Chiasmic Rhetoric: Alan Turing Between Bodies And Words, Patricia Fancher

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This Dissertation analyzes the life and writing of inventor and scientist Alan Turing in order to identify and theorize chiasmic relations between bodies and texts. Chiasmic rhetoric, as I develop throughout the Dissertation, is the dynamic processes between materials and discourses that interact to construct powerful rhetorical effect, shape bodies, and also compose new knowledges. My research here extends our knowledge of the rhetoric of science by demonstrating the ways that Alan Turing's embodied experiences shape his rhetoric. Turing is an unusual figure for research on bodily rhetoric and embodied knowledge. He is often associated with disembodied knowledge and as …

Ubiquitous Libidinal Infrastructures Of Urbanism: The Fringing Benefits Of Rhetorics In Architecture, Lauren Mitchell

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Big-box culture - generally thought of as sprawl - is often suppressed or ignored within architectural design curricula. The overwhelming pervasiveness of big-box culture threatens the foundation of our discipline. We turn away, though it generates the context for many lives to happily unfold in this country. We remain only partially engaged with big-box because we do not fully understand its complexity. We argue with it, but at cross-purposes. This trans-disciplinary project brings rhetorical scholarship to bear on big-box culture. Emphasizing pedagogy, it offers architects and urbanists opportunities to design with more awareness about the ubiquitous, what drives it, and …

Seven Strangers, Rhetorical Devices For Hospitality, Epiphany, And Repentance In The Media Flood, Jimmy Butts

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Beginning with the foundation that rhetorical devices are often inherently defamiliarizing, often to productive ends, this study explores the theories, ethics, and praxis behind defamiliarizing rhetorical tactics. Because of the cultural shift toward increasing novelty within 21st century media production, it is progressively difficult for the contemporary writer to speak into the boisterous public sphere, which in turn creates a growing need for uniquely unfamiliar modes of rhetorical intervention. Strangeness offers a lens for seeing deliberate stylistic choices within the information flood; additionally, it asks us to consider how we can compose for potentially disinterested audiences. The examination also suggests …

Analyzing Nurse-Physician Discursive Practices In Acute Patient Care, John Dinolfo

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This mixed methods study in inter-professional health communication assesses the pedagogical role of writing and visual communication in the education of non-traditional and traditional Nursing students as they interpret and apply the concepts of message framing and message reception in nurse-physician communication. To achieve that goal, this study analyzes the dynamics of terministic screens as message frames that can determine message reception in nurse-physician communication regarding the status of an acute care patient.
The study was conducted in two Nursing writing and communication classes during the Spring 2011 semester. Two study groups (combined across classes) included a mixed population of …

Un/Composing (Visual) Rhetorics: A (Strange) Comic(S) View Of Writing In The Age Of New Media, Sergio Figueiredo

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This dissertation finds its exigency in 'The 9/11 Commission Report,' and specifically its claim that 'a failure of imagination' that dismisses possibilities relates to the work currently in focus within rhetoric and composition studies as it relates to writing (with) new media. My argument relies on the underdeveloped concept of `imagination' in composition as a way to argue for an alternate theoretical framework for addressing what writing (with) new media entails as a growing form of art. As such, I take up Geoff Sirc's invitation to `remake' his English Composition as a Happening with all of its references to avant-garde …

Screen/Writing: Time & Cinematics In An Age Of Rhetorical Memory, Joshua Hilst

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This essay argues that part of memory is external to ourselves. This memory, which began with writing but has since grown to encompass digital media, the internet, and other forms of new media, faces a two-fold problem in the information age. The first is privatization, which is represented by copyright, and has heretofore received a greater share of scholarly attention. Regulation is represented through the concept of protocols, which are the rules digital media execute in order to perform functions. Protocols are a regulation of external memory, which I argue also represents a threat to deliberation, the form of rhetoric …

Rhiz|Comics: The Structure, Sign, And Play Of Image And Text, Jason Helms

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This dissertation combines Gregory Ulmer's post-criticism with multimodal composition resulting in a work that critiques the medium of comics in comics format. Six traditional text chapters forge a theoretical and practical foundation; punctuated within and without by occasional visual interludes and three comic sections. I advocate teaching multimodal composition through comics' interplay of image and text.