Rhetoric Commons^™

Robert Watson’S Lectures At St. Andrews: Logic, Rhetoric And Metaphysics, Rosaleen Greene-Smith Keefe

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the contributions to rhetoric of Robert Watson (1730?-1781), Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews from
1756-1778, and Principal from 1778-1781, based on surviving manuscript sources at St Andrews, and demonstrates the philosophic diversity in rhetorical theory at this time, showing differences among the Scottish literati on the epistemology of language and the origin of grammar, identifying some contrasts and connections between Watson and his near contemporaries Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and George Campbell, and suggesting his distinctive place in the development of 18th century rhetoric and the history of English studies.

Situating Heirloom Presence Within The Family Narrative: That Is/Was Then, This Is/Was Now, Rachel Savorelli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intramundane objects often become “intergenerational transfers of contaminated objects,” commonly known as heirlooms (Belk 151; Heisley and Cours 425; Holmes). Rather than priceless possessions, heirlooms are mostly ordinary objects, such as photographs and gardening tools. Regardless of rarity or monetary value, as familial artifacts, heirlooms compel an ethic of responsibility. For this project, the term “heirlooming” is a performance of communicative practices of story-telling, ritualizing, and kin-keeping that contribute to heirloom preservation and continuation. A narrative ethics background structures family communication to both make meaning and make sense of ongoing and changing practices across generations. Heirlooms situated within family narratives …

Future Climate Rhetorics Of Belize: A Counter-Apocalyptic Inquiry Into Belize’S Possible, Probable, And Preferable Futures, André Habet

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation investigates future climate rhetorics of Belize through a variety of methods in order to mediate the various conceptions of the future professed in climate policy, experiential phenomenology, and acoustic ecologies of agroecology. Chapter one considers the values embedded in climate change policy documents, specifically the Nation Communications documents composed by Belize’s various ministries since the country signed to the Paris Agreement in 2016. Using the People’s Agreement of Cochamba as an alternative lens, the chapter explores how people-centered, as opposed to market-centered, attunements informing climate policy can potentially lead to a more just, equitable future that does not …

Reconnecting With The Truth: Conspiracies, Perspective Taking, And Misinformation, Scott Sellnow-Richmond, Mili Pinski

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

“I’ve done my research.” Misinformation has become a prevalent topic in communication courses, particularly those focused on argumentation, public speaking, or even interpersonal and family communication. Students thus benefit from adapting public speaking-focused assignments to illuminate how to understand - and thus combat- disinformation in their own lives. This assignment works toward this goal in two stages, allowing students to argue not just against misinformation and conspiracies, but also to argue for them as an act of empathy and understanding. The applied nature of this exercise also empowers instructors with a way to concretely address this issue in the classroom. …

“People Don’T Always Show Up The Way You Want Them To”: Utilizing The Hunger Games To Differentiate Between Persuasion, Coercion, Propaganda, And Manipulation, Nancy Bressler

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

The ability to define and conceptualize persuasion and its nuances without engaging in coercion, propaganda, and/or manipulation can be difficult for students at first. This activity centralizes the fine points among these persuasive concepts. Students also recognize the role of their audience in the persuasive messages that they create. Rather than only having a conversation about the common characteristics of these terms and how they differ, students can observe them within the fictional movie The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014). After discussing these ideas with their classmates, students then apply what they have learned by creating persuasive messages …

Front Matter

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.

John O'Malley As A Guide For Eloquentia Perfecta, Community-Engaged Work, And Graduate Education, Allen Brizee, Stephanie Hurter Brizee, Colten Biro, Meha Gupta

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

John O’Malley, S.J., was primarily a Jesuit and Catholic historian. But to scholars in writing studies, his work is illuminative due to his rhetorical analysis of church documents and his discussion of eloquentia perfecta when examining Jesuit education. More recently, in works like “’Not for Ourselves Alone,” he stresses the importance of Jesuit education focusing on the betterment of others inside and outside of the academy. During an interview conducted four months before his death, O’Malley restated the necessity of Jesuit education including writing and vita activa, that is, active civic life. In this article, we pay tribute to …

Framing Contexts And Immersion: The Functionality Of Trpg Frames In Dimension 20’S Fantasy High Series, Lyndsey Clark

Student Research Submissions

This paper uses a form of rhetorical criticism known as frame analysis to analyze the perspective frames within the context of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). The three frames of interest in this study include the person frame, the player frame, and the character frame. These frames are used to contextualize certain person, player, and character interactions and immersion contexts within the first season of Dimension 20’s actual play podcast, Fantasy High. Through these three frames, we can see the breakdown of the person, player, and character mindset, as well as the overlap of thought, emotions, and ideas between …

Teaching About Teaching: A Philosophy Of Critical Literacy Through Phenomenological Ethics And Rhetorical Practices, Corina Lerma

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis presents a phenomenological approach to developing an alternative teaching curriculum for a first-year writing course anchored in rhetorical practices, but reflecting upon my experiences and understandings of phenomenological ethics and philosophy, which I believe can help envision the classroom differently and provides relevant theories to help develop more ethically aware rhetorical practices for first-year composition students. A phenomenological ethical approach that is grounded in experience, embraces ambiguity as an access point, and makes a call to responsibility and problematizes the ideas associated decontextualized and prescriptive teaching practices in higher education foregrounds the ethical implications and responsibilities we hold …

Rhetorical Conversations: Race, Class, And Gender In The Works Of Jacqueline Jones Royster And Shirley Wilson Logan, Tanya Robertson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project is an examination of Jacqueline Jones Royster and Shirley Wilson Logan as knowledge-makers in the field of rhetoric and composition. There is a large gap in research on the contemporary African American women scholars who act as knowledge makers of rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogy. There is circularity in the notion that as Royster and Logan examine the history of the fieldâ??African American rhetorical practices, feministic rhetorical practices, English language studies and literacy, and classroom practicesâ??they are, themselves, having an impact on the field.

Centering Community College Students' Experiences: A Multiple Methods Study Of Multiple Measures For Writing Placement, Nicole L. Hancock

English Theses & Dissertations

Community colleges are trying to reform their placement procedures from use of a single placement test score to a system that collects multiple measures to be used either as a replacement solitary measure or in conjunction with other measures for more accurate placement into writing courses than what occurred with the placement test, which often resulted in disparate impact for students of color. In this study of multiple measures placement assessment for writing courses, I critique several large studies of community college multiple measures assessment for the lack of a community college perspective. The studies largely supported use of high …

A Nexus Of Literate Activity: The Design Of Writing Assignments In The Disciplines, Lauriellen Stankavich

English Theses & Dissertations

Writing plays a critical role in higher education as students are inducted into disciplinary practices through different genres, methodological repertoires and argumentation strategies. In Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives, the instructor serves as an embodied reservoir of disciplinary knowledge and an arbiter of literate practices but most crucially employs the mediating capacities of the writing assignment as a potent pedagogical nexus. In this practice space, the instructor acts as designer of the pedagogical experience—the course as a whole and writing assignments in particular. This study used interviews, survey, and the collection of syllabi and other instructional artifacts to examine …

Natural History Of Discourse Of Missouri House Bill 1042: Bringing A Critical Perspective To Policy Engagement In Two-Year Contexts, Mary Casey Reid

English Theses & Dissertations

In this autoethnographically-infused natural history of discourse (NHD) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Slembrouck, 2001), I use methods from critical discourse studies (CDS) to trace 10 years of changes in “remediation” discourses within a corpus of texts associated with Missouri HB 1042, a piece of legislation passed in 2012 that requires higher education institutions to “replicate best practices in remediation” (CBHE, 2013). After providing national and state context related to HB 1042 and the discourses circulating within the HB 1042 corpus of texts, I describe what I call the “higher ed’s remediation problem” discourse, focusing on three discourse features that I …

An Inclusive Framework For Ministry: Fostering The Spiritual Formation Of Children In A Multicultural Church, Jennifer Reinsch Schroeder

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This project thesis was designed to foster the spiritual formation of children in a multicultural church. A diverse team was assembled to design a curriculum to be used with volunteers in a children’s ministry context. Through seven two-hour sessions held over eight weeks in the spring of 2022, the curriculum development team first examined what it means to embody a multicultural perspective of the gospel while at the same time investigating the negative impact of a White, Eurocentric expression of Christianity. Next, they collaborated to develop a theological construct that centered around (1) the idea of being created in the …

The Comedy Of Cancel Culture In A Post-Carlin United States: On The Politics Of Cultural Interpretation, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Taking the form of a critical review of the HBO documentary George Carlin's American Dream, this essay explores the character of George Carlin's political and cultural criticism, its implications for contemporary debates about so-called "cancel culture," and the broader political significance of cultural interpretation.

Assembly Line Americans: Labor, Language, And Literacy At Ford Motors, Vincent Portillo

Dissertations - ALL

Assembly Line Americans: Labor, Language, and Literacy at Ford Motors explores the significance of Henry Ford’s and Ford Motor’s industrial education project, which impacted the working-class life and educational development of migrants and US citizens alike. Ford’s industrial education project emerged in its Highland Park, Michigan plant where Ford produced Model T’s and in 1914 founded the Ford English School (FES). The FES engaged an Americanization curriculum as a way of preparing a largely migrant workforce for labor on the assembly line and to apply for US citizenship in the name of developing an industrial class of labor. I begin …

Introduction To Special Issue On Intercultural And Participatory Risk Communication About Covid-19: Using Immaterial Labor To Promote Social Justice In A Pandemic, Huiling Ding, Yeqing Kong

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

No abstract provided.

Rpcg - Special Issue, 2022

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

No abstract provided.

Building Coalitions To Support Indigenous Language Speakers During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Erika Hernández Cuevas, Laura J. Gonzales

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

While the work of language access is ongoing and has been taking place for a long time in various contexts, language access efforts often ignore Indigenous communities. As such, more interventions are needed to recognize how health-related messaging needs to be adapted not only across languages, but across worldviews. In this article, a technical communication scholar and Spanish-English translator and a Chinateco-Spanish translator, interpreter, and activist from the Municipio de San Pedro Yolox discuss their work to foster language access during the COVID-19 pandemic for and with Indigenous language speakers in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico, and Gainesville, Florida, USA. Through …

Translingual And Translational Practices As Rhetorical Care Technologies In Covid-19 Recovery, Soyeon Lee

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Drawing from an ethnographic study with Korean-speaking language minority communities in an urban metropolitan area in the United Sates, this study illuminates how multilingual transnational community workers and members cope with disaster recovery–specific technologies in the aftermath of COVID-19. Networking studies on language and cultural differences and studies on care rhetorics in feminist science and technology studies, this study examines how language minorities enact translingual and translational activities as care practices. By attending to racial, linguistic, and cultural differences and unequal power structures, this study identifies four emerging findings: 1) developing translingual attunements; 2) cultivating transmodal attunements; 3) producing translational …

The Communicative And Affective Labor Of Public Pandemic Diaries: The Case Of Fang Fang’S Wuhan Diary, Chen Chen

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

This article studies the immaterial labor of Fang Fang’s Wuhan diary about the Wuhan COVID-19 lockdown time period, Jan 23 to Apr 8, 2020 (her diary ran from Jan 25 to Mar 24). Guided by social justice-informed, critically contextualized methodology, this analysis examines how the rhetoric of Fang Fang’s diary as tactical communication contributed to enacting social justice during the Wuhan lockdown by recognizing, revealing and rejecting oppressions people experienced both due to the challenges of the pandemic outbreak and the government’s inadequate and problematic responses. In doing so, Fang Fang uses her own positionality and privilege to challenge problematic …

Manufactured Scarcity: Countering Artificial Information Vacuums Through Grassroot Risk Communications During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Pritisha Shrestha, Gabriella Wilson

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only revealed medical disparities between countries in terms of access to vaccines but has also unveiled huge rifts in knowledge and information flow regarding the pandemic and vaccination amongst the general public. With this in view, we will interrogate how grassroot communicators and social networking sites have worked alongside each other to disseminate information about the pandemic that counters the narratives provided by the state. As scholars of rhetoric, we intend to trace the ways in which professional communication and state disinformation produce information vacuums amongst citizens while also illuminating how localized resistance and …

Intercultural Content Reuse And Social Justice: Comparing Chinese And U.S. Media Coverage Of Anti-Asian Racism During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Chenxing Xie

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The outbreak of COVID-19 as a global pandemic has brought human society tremendous pressure and significant changes. Asian Americans suffered from both the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian racism. Organizations were established to fight against anti-Asian hate and related crimes. An organization named Stop AAPI Hate publishes yearly reports regarding anti-Asian hate, and the content is reused by mass and social media worldwide. This study adopts theories of content reuse, intercultural communication, immaterial labor, and social justice to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the content reused by mass and social media in China and the United States. The results show …

Pursuing Inclusion And Justice While Affirming The Mental Health Of Marginalized Students, Tyshee E. Sonnier, Claire J. Stevenson, Joshua H. Miller

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This article provides best practices that instructors can use to affirm and support marginalized students’ mental health with a specific focus on students of color. Recently, campuses have witnessed renewed calls for diversity and inclusion in the wake of anti-Black violence. Advocates have called for needed structural changes. To build upon these calls for change, this article provides instructors with tools they can use in the interim to navigate questions of diversity, inclusion, and justice in the classroom. The essay centers the mental health needs of students from marginalized populations to hedge against the possibility that efforts to foster inclusion, …

Language And Power In Social Movements: Hearing All The Voices In Food System Advocacy Narratives, Dianna Winslow

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[From first paragraph] Everyone must eat. It is this immediate and personal connection to food which drives public and scholarly interest in the complex narratives emerging in what is becoming known as the “food movement”—activism on a global scale that is challenging how the industrialized production, distribution and consumption of food is affecting environmental conditions, food sovereignty and security, human health and wellness, and cultural identities. As the number of food advocacy groups promoting different, yet overlapping, public concerns continues to increase, so does the flow of language used by these groups to shape collective identities and political stances, which …

Weathering The Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies Of Communication In Times Of Crisis, Austin Hestdalen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores cities as urban ecologies of communication in which crises emerge and are given significance within the dialogic relations cultivated among public actors attempting to make a living, together, within the shared historical-cultural contexts of everyday life. To describe cities as urban ecologies of communication is to describe them in terms of urban communication and its interdisciplinary foundations in the study of rhetoric, philosophy, planning, policy, architecture, sociology, geography, and media. The first chapter introduces the challenges of urban risk and crisis management within the complex ecologies of communication constituted by cities and reviews how ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ …

To The Glory Of God Evaluating Origen’S Exposition Of The Scripture In His Leviticus Homilies, Andrew Johnson

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Johnson, Andrew M. “To the Glory of God: Evaluating Origen’s Exposition of the Scripture in His Leviticus Homilies”. Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2022. 237 pp.

Origen has been called “Adamantine,” an impossibly hard metal. Many have found his work to be strong and powerful and equal in its density. Origen’s preaching is almost impenetrable to the Evangelical preacher. This dissertation seeks to offer an entry for modern evangelical preachers to engage with the historic practice of figural exposition in Origen’s Leviticus homilies. The dissertation investigates the interpretative, homiletical and rhetorical histories which intersect in Origen’s homilies. It unpacks Origen’s use …

Taiwanese Indigenous Representation, Rhetoric Of Resistance, And Heteroglossia In Warriors Of The Rainbow: Seediq Bale., John Yu-Choh Chang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between Taiwanese indigenous narrative and rhetoric, in textual representations of the Seediq people and the 1930 Musha Incident. It explores how the forced colonization of Taiwanese indigenous people affected their identities and cultural representation, and how multi-voiced forms of narrative, storytelling, and meaning-making have rooted in indigenous oral traditions and rituals that counter colonial representations. Across a range of cultural texts, I identify what I call Taiwanese indigenous rhetoric of resistance (TIRR), drawing on Simon J. Ortiz’s theory of indigenous literature and oral traditions as indigenous-nationalist forms of cultural resistance. In addition, I draw on …

Rewilding With Ar And Vr: Facilitating Care With Photography In Physically Immersive Apps, Kailan Sindelar

All Dissertations

In this dissertation I analyze two AR apps from Internet of Elephants, Safari Central and Wildeverse, and one VR app from National Geographic, National Geographic: Explore VR. These three apps use photography as the central tool for engagement, attempt to educate users, and prompt them to care about wildlife and wilderness. However, the ethical consideration of design has largely ignored representations of the environment, especially as it may intersect with facilitating care for wilderness and wildlife that is experiencing the effects of habitat destruction and environmental degradation. This project begins developing a critical discussion of how wilderness and …

Visual Rhetoric And The English Careers Website, Ifeoma C. Oforah

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

We live in a fast-paced, visually-saturated 21st-century world where people want to access the latest information as quickly and conveniently as possible. Images play a role in efficient communication because they can convey concepts that words alone cannot. The pairing of visual content with written text is ubiquitous in everyday communication. Visual content functions to supplement and complement the written word, further engaging the audience and creating a thorough understanding. The persuasiveness of visual content cannot be ignored. This thesis analyzes the pictorial elections I made as an intern for the English Department using the concepts I gleaned from researching …