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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

"Don't Put Restrictions On Us": The Dangers Of Conservative And Populist Appeals For Abortion Access In Post-Roe America, Kayla Schmitz May 2023

"Don't Put Restrictions On Us": The Dangers Of Conservative And Populist Appeals For Abortion Access In Post-Roe America, Kayla Schmitz

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis critically analyzes Kansans for Constitutional Freedom’s campaign ads for their campaign against the Value Them Both Amendment in Kansas in 2022. Value Them Both would have stripped the Kansas constitution of its protection of personal autonomy and therefore abortion rights. Kansans for Constitutional Freedom used populist and otherwise conservative appeals in their ads to reach audiences across the political “spectrum” to gain their votes against Value Them Both. While the campaign was widely successful, there are many things it did not do for the broader concern of reproductive healthcare access in the United States, particularly for those living …


Faking And Conspiring About Covid-19: A Discursive Approach, Rosa Scardigno, Alessia Paparella, Francesca D'Errico Jan 2023

Faking And Conspiring About Covid-19: A Discursive Approach, Rosa Scardigno, Alessia Paparella, Francesca D'Errico

The Qualitative Report

In the more general climate of post-truth - a social trend reflecting a disregard for reliable ways of knowing what is true, mostly acted through massive use of misinformation and rhetoric calling for emotions - an alarming “infodemic” accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting healthy attitudes and behaviors and further lessening trust in science, institutions, and traditional media. Its two main representative items, fake and conspiracy news, have been widely analyzed in psycho-social research, even if scholars mostly acknowledged the cognitive and social dimensions of those items and devoted less attention to their discursive construction. In addition, these works did not …


Leveraging The Rhetorical Energies Of Machines: Covid-19, Misinformation, And Persuasive Labor, Miles C. Coleman Sep 2021

Leveraging The Rhetorical Energies Of Machines: Covid-19, Misinformation, And Persuasive Labor, Miles C. Coleman

Human-Machine Communication

The rampant misinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates an obvious need for persuasion. This article draws on the fields of digital rhetoric and rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine to explore the persuasive threats and opportunities machine communicators pose to public health. As a specific case, Alexa and the machine’s performative similarities to the Oracle at Delphi are tracked alongside the voice-based assistant’s further resonances with the discourses of expert systems to develop an account of the machine’s rhetorical energies. From here, machine communicators are discussed as optimal deliverers of inoculations against misinformation in light of the fact that their …