Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Online Gaming And Teamwork, Lakshmi Jagad Ms.

Communication Theses

This thesis aims to find out the relationship, if any, between playing multi-player online games and developing teamwork qualities. Online multi-player games involve thousands of players who play in teams (or solo, as the preference may be) in sophisticated gaming environments. As gamers team together to complete missions within the game, teamwork concepts such as communication skills, leadership, coordination, negotiation and other similar qualities come to the fore. The research component of this thesis consists of a survey where respondents answered questions about their online gaming behavior. They also answered questions about their experience working in teams in the offline …

Identification Is Persuasion: Eisenhower’S Call For Unity And The Founding Of Nato’S Military Headquarters, Debra N. Fossum

Communication Theses

Historians of the founding years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) acknowledge General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s role as the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), yet they ignore the effect Eisenhower’s rhetoric had in the creation of a sense of unity among Western European nations. Rhetorical analysis of Eisenhower’s time as SACEUR offers scholars a unique look into the founding years of NATO and the beginning of European unification. Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of the four master tropes, I analyze how Eisenhower’s role in the development of NATO was important to the eventual development of a unified Europe.

No Angel: An Analysis Of Media Coverage Of Nadja Benaissa In The U.K., U.S. And Germany, Elizabeth A. Cantrell

Communication Theses

The media’s portrayal of HIV has taken a number of different forms since the disease was first discovered over three decades ago. HIV has been portrayed as an epidemic and a disease affecting homosexuals and immigrants. Its transmission has also been portrayed as a criminal offense. In August 2010, the German singer Nadja Benaissa was arrested for passing on HIV to a former partner and exposing two other men. Media constructions of this story draw upon HIV stereotypes because of her drug-using past, her immigrant status and her criminal actions. This media study points to a new discourse centered on …

Competing Image Vernaculars In The Anti-Lynching Movement Of The 1930'S, Samuel P. Perry

Communication Dissertations

Lynching photographs and images of spectacle lynching were originally produced to commemorate and celebrate lynching. Through processes of rhetorical re-circulation and repurposing of lynching photographs by those in the anti-lynching movement, lynching and visual representations of it became socially unacceptable. The rhetorical strategies concerning the display of images of violence toward African Americans developed in the anti-lynching movement became one of the most important means of protesting civil rights violations in the United States. This study examines three cases of repurposing lynching photographs during the peak of the anti-lynching movement in the 1930’s. The first is the NAACP sponsored Art …

Rhetorical Failures, Psychoanalytic Heroes: A Psychorhetoric Of Social Change, Kimberly D. Huff

Communication Dissertations

This dissertation confronts the rhetorical discipline with the Real of an antagonism illuminated through its encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather than eliding the desire of subjects in favor of traditional discursive rhetorical solutions, the pschorhetorical response I will propose locates desire and the subject in the moments where communication fails and seeks to make public the realization of desire. Through the psychoanalytic analysis of three acts of agency that comprise rhetorical failure, I will argue that rhetorical analyses of social change are actually not persuasive enough in their acceptance that social reality is entirely mediated. The cases will show that …

Discourse Analysis Of Public Debate Over U.S. Government Faith-Based Initiative Of 2001, Vincente S. Scott

Communication Theses

This thesis uses the discourse analysis methods developed by T. Van Dijk and J. P. Gee to examine public debate over the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001 as it arose in testimony before the U. S. House of Representatives and related news articles published in the

New York Times and Washington Post.

In analyzing the language used in the congressional hearings and news articles printed between January 2001 and December 2004, Van Dijk‘s categories and related questions were methodologically combined with Gee‘s approach to provide a framework and method for analyzing the underlying discourse. While debate participants expressed strong …

Webs Of Resistance: The Citizen Online Journalism Of The Nigerian Digital Diaspora, Farooq A. Kperogi

Communication Dissertations

The enhanced discursive opportunity structures that the Internet enables has inspired a momentous revolution in the Nigerian media landscape. This dissertation chronicles the emergence and flowering of the citizen and alternative online journalism of the Nigerian diasporic public sphere located primarily in the United States. Using case-study research, it profiles the major diasporan online citizen media outlets and highlights instances where these geographically distant citizen media sites shaped and influenced both the national politics and policies of the homeland and the media practices of the domestic media formation.

The study makes the case that while it is customary in the …

Communicating With The World: History Of Rhetorical Responses To International Crisis And The 2007 U.S. National Strategy For Public Diplomacy And Strategic Communication, Laurel R. Berryman

Communication Theses

Following the events of September 11, 2001, we have seen a revival in American public diplomacy. I argue the U.S. continues to rely on similar rhetorical responses to crisis that are an essential part of American public diplomacy interconnected through history, from the birth of our country to the recent 2007 U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication. Tracing this recurring rhetorical process from our founding to the Carter Administration illustrates our reliance on similar rhetoric despite changing contexts. I use Burke’s concept of identification and the interrelated use of ethos and enemy construction to demonstrate the rhetorical …

Imagining Queerness: Sexualities In Underground Films In The Contemporary P. R. China, Jin Zhao

Communication Theses

In response to the globalizing queerness argument and the cultural specificity argument in queer cultural studies, this thesis examines the emerging modern queer identity and culture in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) in an intercultural context. Recognizing Chinese queer culture as an unstable, transforming and complex collection of congruent and/or contesting meanings, not only originated in China but also traveling across cultures, this thesis aims to exorcise the reified images of Chinese queers, or tongzhi, to contribute to the understanding of a dynamic construction of Chinese queerness at the turn of a new century, and to lend insight …

Facebook Friendships Between College/University Instructors And Students: Deciding Whether Or Not To Allow Students As Friends, Communicating With Students, And The Individual Differences That Influence Instructors' Impression Management On Facebook, Melissa S. Plew

Communication Dissertations

This research examined Facebook friendships between college/university instructors and students. Based on the development of instructor-student dual relationships, this study described instructors’ Facebook use with students. This included explanations for allowing/not allowing students, communication with students, and ethical concerns. Rooted in the theories of impression management, self-monitoring and role conflict, plus the concept of ambient awareness, hypotheses predicted relationships between instructors’ individual differences and Facebook use: (1) self-monitoring would be positively related to role conflict; and (2) self-monitoring, (3) role conflict, and (4) ambient awareness would be positively related to instructors’ self-presentation, impression management behaviors, and privacy management. Emails were …

Constructing Asian/American Women On Screen, Charleen M. Wilcox

Communication Theses

Asian/American women occupy a highly circumscribed subject position in popular Western culture that entails a unique reading of our bodies. My discussion of this group will gain greater depth and scope by using Black body theory as a theoretical framework to better understand how Asian/American bodies become a site to enact a multitude of fantasies, fears, and anxieties. I will examine three case studies: the construction of the interracial “romance” featuring Asian/American women produced in classical Hollywood cinema, interracial pornography featuring Asian/American female performers, and the independent works of Asian/American feminist filmmakers. Topics interrogated include the over-determination of non-White bodies …

The Flow Of The Water: Contemporary American Realisms, Justin Horton

Communication Theses

"Realism" is one of the enduring theoretical problems of the cinema. This study aims to broaden the parameters of the term by focusing on an often overlooked strain of thought that flows throughout the work of a number of prominent and seemingly incongruous thinkers such as Bazin, Kracauer, Benjamin, Barthes, Buñuel, and others. Realism, I contend, is undergirded by something far more elusive and irrational than verisimilitude or social commentary. To demonstrate, I will examine a body of contemporary American films that I will cast—perhaps provocatively—as realist. I rely heavily upon Deleuze to discuss how free indirect discourse and the …