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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

Statistical Distributions Of Consonant Variants In Infant-Directed Speech: Evidence That /T/ May Be Exceptional, Laura Dilley, Jessica Gamache, Yuanyuan Wang, Derek M. Houston, Tonya R. Bergeson Jul 2019

Statistical Distributions Of Consonant Variants In Infant-Directed Speech: Evidence That /T/ May Be Exceptional, Laura Dilley, Jessica Gamache, Yuanyuan Wang, Derek M. Houston, Tonya R. Bergeson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Statistical distributions of phonetic variants in spoken language influence speech perception for both language learners and mature users. We theorized that patterns of phonetic variant processing of consonants demonstrated by adults might stem in part from patterns of early exposure to statistics of phonetic variants in infant-directed (ID) speech. In particular, we hypothesized that ID speech might involve greater proportions of canonical /t/ pronunciations compared to adult-directed (AD) speech in at least some phonological contexts. This possibility was tested using a corpus of spontaneous speech of mothers speaking to other adults, or to their typically-developing infant. Tokens of word-final alveolar …


Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl Jan 2015

Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self-care. Whether sex positive or sex negative, both communities articulate a model of sexual health that negates women’s status as active, desiring subjects. Ultimately, we argue that public scrutiny of women’s vaginas implicitly and overtly …


Exoticizing Poverty In Bizarre Foods America, Casey R. Kelly Jan 2015

Exoticizing Poverty In Bizarre Foods America, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

No abstract provided.


Of Frogs & Rhetoric: The Atrazine Wars, Carol Reeves Jan 2015

Of Frogs & Rhetoric: The Atrazine Wars, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In a scientific dispute over the effects of atrazine on amphibians, chemical industry–funded and publically funded scientists present stunningly contrasting constructions of atrazine's environmental concentrations, persistence, and potential to harm. Considerable scientific uncertainties and variable ranges allow authors to construct preferred versions of the story of atrazine. These incommensurate rhetorical constructions, more the result of competing economic and environmental interests than of any paradigmatic misalignments, have prolonged the dispute not only over atrazine's effects but also over whether its sales should be banned.


Détournement, Decolonization, And The American Indian Occupation Of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971), Casey R. Kelly Jan 2014

Détournement, Decolonization, And The American Indian Occupation Of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971), Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

On November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” (IOAT) invaded Alcatraz Island. The group’s founding proclamation was addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People,” and declared “We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (2). Tongue-in-cheek, the IOAT offered to purchase Alcatraz Island for “twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red clothe.” In this essay, I illustrate how the IOAT engaged in a rhetoric of détournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates …


Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories In Contemporary Documentaries About The Black Power Movement, Kristen Hoerl Jan 2014

Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories In Contemporary Documentaries About The Black Power Movement, Kristen Hoerl

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Contemporary rhetoric about race and racism has been shaped, in part, by popular films. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has provided a variety of what Kelly Madison refers to as "anti-racist-white-hero" films.1 Movies including Amistad, Cry Freedom, The Long Walk Home, Mississippi Burning, and Ghosts of Mississippi have routinely positioned white protagonists as civil rights heroes who win justice for the black community by punishing or humiliating white antagonists. Each film frames racial injustice as the consequence of closed-minded individuals, rather than as the outcome of the U.S. economic and political system. More recently, the motion pictures …


Bizarre Foods: White Privilege And The Neocolonial Palate, Casey R. Kelly Jan 2014

Bizarre Foods: White Privilege And The Neocolonial Palate, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

No abstract provided.


“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning Of In American Indian Resistance To President Johnson's War On Poverty, Casey R. Kelly Jan 2014

“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning Of In American Indian Resistance To President Johnson's War On Poverty, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This essay examines how the ideograph was crafted through dialectical struggles between Euro-Americans and American Indians over federal Indian policy between 1964 and 1968. For policymakers, was historically sutured to the belief that assimilation was the only pathway to American Indian liberation. I explore the American Indian youth movement's response to President Johnson's War on Poverty to demonstrate how activists rhetorically realigned in Indian policy with the Great Society's rhetoric of “community empowerment.” I illustrate how American Indians orchestrated counterhegemonic resistance by reframing the “Great Society” as an argument for a “Greater Indian American.” This analysis evinces the rhetorical significance …


Molding Messages: Analyzing The Reworking Of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ In Grimm’S Fairy Tale Classics And Dollhouse, Jeana Jorgensen, Brittany Warman Jan 2014

Molding Messages: Analyzing The Reworking Of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ In Grimm’S Fairy Tale Classics And Dollhouse, Jeana Jorgensen, Brittany Warman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The story of “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410) is one of the most consistently captivating fairy tales. It tells of a cursed princess dreaming in a tower, waiting patiently for her prince to rescue her. Those who recreate the tale for contemporary audiences spin the story anew, reconstructing again and again what it means both to sleep and to awaken. This chapter analyzes two modern television versions of the tale, one for children and one for adults, comparing their incorporation of feminist messages and parallel ideas about shaping narratives and shaping lives. The children’s cartoon Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics (also called …


Genesis In Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy At The Creation Museum, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl Jan 2012

Genesis In Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy At The Creation Museum, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the "Answers in Genesis" ministry's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Founded by a $27 million grant, the 70,000 square-foot museum appropriates the stylistic and authoritative signifiers of natural history museums, complete with technically proficient hyperreal displays and modern curatorial techniques. In this essay, we argue that the museum provides a culturally authoritative space in which Young Earth Creationists can visually craft the appearance that there is an ongoing scientific controversy over matters long settled in the scientific community (evolution), or what scholars call a disingenuous or manufactured controversy. We analyze the displays and …


Neocolonialism And The Global Prison In National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad, Casey R. Kelly Jan 2012

Neocolonialism And The Global Prison In National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This essay examines the reformulation of colonial ideologies in National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, a documentary program that chronicles the narratives of Westerner travelers incarcerated in foreign nations. An analysis of Locked Up Abroad evinces neocolonialism in contemporary media culture, including: the historic association between dark-skin and savagery, the backwardness of the non-Western world, and the Western imperative to civilize it. The program's documentary techniques and framing devises sustain an Otherizing gaze toward non-Western societies, and its portrayals elide a critical analysis of colonialism in its present forms. I advocate for neocolonial criticism to trace how NatGeo remains haunted …


Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill And The Racialization Of American Indian Identity, Casey R. Kelly Jan 2011

Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill And The Racialization Of American Indian Identity, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal communities and American Indian scholarship. Responses to Churchill's academic and ethnic self-identification have retrenched a racialized definition of tribal identity defined by a narrow concept of blood. Employing what I term blood-speak, Churchill's opponents harness a biological concept …


Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves Jan 2011

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.


Capitalizing On Affect: Viagra (In)Action, Kristin A. Swenson Jan 2008

Capitalizing On Affect: Viagra (In)Action, Kristin A. Swenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Recent cultural criticisms of Viagra’s advertisements and promotional materials have argued that rhetorical constructions of Viagra users reestablish a hegemonic masculinity premised on heterosexual standards of traditional gender norms (Baglia, 2005; Bordo, 2000; Loe, 2004). Cultural critics have also noted that Viagra’s promotional materials allow “for alternative readings by potential users who do not fall into the category of the ‘traditional/ideal’ Viagra user” including women and homosexual men (Mamo & Fishman, 2001, p. 14). What most criticisms fail to take into account is that Viagra, like other lifestyle drugs, does not only reestablish cultural constructs of the contemporary gendered body …


"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves Jan 2005

"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.


An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves Jan 2002

An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A significant theoretical shift in the research community examining a class of terminal, infectious neurological disorders that includes Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru was assisted by rhetorical production. The local rhetoric of one laboratory, that of Professor Stanley B. Prusiner, involved first situating an heretical hypothesis within the framework of the orthodox narrative and then audaciously promoting that heresy. Another aspect of rhetorical production in this case involved situating a new language associated with the heretical hypothesis. To promote their new lexicon, the Prusiner team evoked orthodox values of consistency, efficiency, and collective ratification. Eventually, what was once …


Monstrous Youth In Suburbia: Disruption And Recovery Of The American Dream, Kristen Hoerl Jan 2002

Monstrous Youth In Suburbia: Disruption And Recovery Of The American Dream, Kristen Hoerl

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Although the American Dream myth idealizes youth who grow up in suburbia as culturetypes of imminent success, the Columbine High School shootings demonstrated that all not suburban youth will grow up to succeed. The extensive news media coverage of the tragedy reflects broader anxieties about the declining status of the suburbs in American society. In the wake of the shootings, the news media created a myth of monstrous youth in suburbia that functioned to repair suburbanites’ waning faith in the myth of the American Dream.


Rhetoric And The Aids Virus Hunt, Carol Reeves Jan 1998

Rhetoric And The Aids Virus Hunt, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

By comparing the papers produced by the laboratory teams of Robert Gallo and Jean Luc Montagnier during the AIDS virus hunt, we have an opportunity to discern the fine line between a bold, explicit rhetoric that may convince as well as offend and a bald, reserved rhetoric that may actually conceal important implications. Going too far in either direction may create misunderstandings and ethical dilemmas as will be demonstrated in a textual analysis deepened by an exploration of historical context and interviews with key participants. Since a public health crisis calls upon communication that thwarts misunderstandings, scientists should understand the …


Owning A Virus: The Rhetoric Of Scientific Discovery Accounts, Carol Reeves Jan 1992

Owning A Virus: The Rhetoric Of Scientific Discovery Accounts, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No Abstract Available


Establishing The Phenomenon: The Rhetoric Of Early Research Reports On Aids, Carol Reeves Jan 1990

Establishing The Phenomenon: The Rhetoric Of Early Research Reports On Aids, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the first three medical reports on AIDS which were published in 1981 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the writers' primary rhetorical agenda was to argue that a new medical discovery had been made. A secondary agenda was to offer etiological explanations for the new problem. To establish the new disease entity as deserving serious attention, the writers built a sense of mystery by confronting established medical knowledge about immunodeficiency and emphasizing the inability of modern medicine to diagnose and treat the problem. When they explained the phenomenon in etiological terms, rather than confronting the disciplinary matrix, the …