Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Bureaucratic Modernity And The Erosion Of Practical Reason: A Rhetorical Education As An Antidote, David Impellizzeri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To what extent and in what ways does modernity reveal itself through the bureaucratic? This project aims at an interpretive understanding of bureaucratic modernity. The rationalization of society and action in the (late) modern world requires that an increasing number of human activities and domains be explained in allegedly neutral, ‘rational’ terms and without reference to morally substantive ends. Ultimately, this entails a form of epistemic reductionism that elevates instrumental rationality to the exclusion of practical reason and probabilistic ways of knowing. Bureaucratic modernity signifies a decrease in choices that can be legitimized in public on some basis other …

Minimizing The Dangers Of Air Pollution Using Alternative Facts: A Science Museum Case Study, David H. Lee

Publications and Research

A science museum exhibition about human health contains an exhibit that minimizes health impacts of air pollution. Relevant details, such as the full range of health risks; fossil fuel combustion; air quality statutes (and the local electrical utility’s violations of these statues), are omitted, while end users of electricity are blamed. The exhibit accomplishes this, not through outright falsification, but through selected “alternative facts” that change the focus and imply misleading alternate explanations. Using two classical rhetorical concepts (the practical syllogism and the enthymeme) allows for the surfacing of missing evidence and unstated directives underlying multimodal rhetoric. By stating multimedia …

Rhetsec_ | Rhetorical Security, Jennifer Mead

Culminating Projects in English

Rhetsec_ examines the rhetorical situation, the rhetorical appeals, and how phishing emails simulate "real" emails in five categories of phishing emails. While the first focus of cybersecurity is security, you must also understand the language of computers to know how to secure them. Phishing is one way to compromise security using computers, and so the computer becomes a tool for malicious language (phishing emails and malware) to be transmitted. Therefore to be concerned with securing computers, then you must also be concerned with language. Language is rhetoric's domain, and the various rhetorical elements which create an identity of the phisher …

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …

Evidence-Based Design: Documenting A Research Experiment In A School Environment With Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Julie E. Irish

Julie Elaine Irish

Purpose Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder affecting around 1:59 children. Among other characteristics, children with ASD can be unduly sensitive to elements in the built environment, such as noise or light. Despite this knowledge, to date there has been little evidence-based experimental research investigating how the environment affects them. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an experiment in a school environment with children with ASD and document the process as a model that other researchers could apply to similar studies.

Design/methodology/approach The study focused on whether the application of wayfinding aids (colored doors, colored shapes …

A New Materialist Rhetoric: Theorizing Movement From A Rhetorical Ethnography Of Hiking, Bryan Picciotto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the field of rhetoric, conventional concepts of movement depend on dialectical theories of materiality that posit matter is not rhetorical until acted upon by human sign or symbol systems. New materialist philosophy, which considers the dynamism of matter without situating materiality in dialectical relationship to language, provides a theoretical context for reconceptualizing the rhetoricity of movement. Working from a nondialectical approach to materiality, this dissertation theorizes how movement functions rhetorically, specifically within cultural practices of hiking. For this project, I participated in 15+ hikes at state and national parks in Maine, and generated a multimodal archive of 1,000+ audio, …

Rhetoric’S Demagogue | Demagoguery’S Rhetoric: An Introduction, Ryan Skinnell

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery—how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to …

Typed Document: The College And University Women’S Public Leadership Consortium Mentors

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

List of mentors for The College and University Women's Public Leadership Consortium. No date given Box: 7 Folder: 15

When Humanity Meets Technology: Contemplating Neil Postman's Critique Of Advertising, Yingwen Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to contemplate Postman’s critique of advertising and offer insights to understand Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) in today’s mediated environment. As an essential component of IMC, the history of advertising demonstrates and documents that the medium of communication has an extensive influence on IMC practices. The concern about how communication media affect human perception, understanding, and behavior, resides within the central claim of the study of media ecology. Thus, this project investigates IMC through the lens of Postman’s media ecology perspectives, and argues that Postman’s prescient ideas provide both hope and constructive insights. Moreover, Postman’s thermostatic perspective, rooted …

The Ethics Of Occultic Communication: An Invocation Of Joshua Gunn And Sissela Bok, James Thomas Begley Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Opening Statements In Trial: Reconsidering The Classical Canon Of Invention, Andrew Chandler

Undergraduate Theses

This analysis of 21 opening statements probes at current persuasive practices employed by trial attorneys through the lens of mainstream legal advice and an expanded definition of rhetorical invention – one which includes both discovery and creation. An evaluation of such practice reveals the utility, and furthermore the duty of the advocate, to draw upon an expanded realm of available arguments.

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

An Archive Of Pain: In Queer Suicide's Cultural Wake, Evan Schares

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that queer death is a chief site of political struggle over gender, race, and sexuality in contemporary culture. I consider myriad archives in the aftermath of three queer suicides, an aggregate of discourses I call cultural wakes, to examine how white affective investments circulate around the forces of racism, sexism, and citizenship. I place in situ the trauma of queer pain and loss against the global backdrop of public emotionality.

Using From The Heartland In The First-Year Writing Classroom: Measuring Instructor Reception Of The Customized Textbook, Sarah Cohen

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The aim of the first-year writing program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) is to equip students with critical reading and writing tools and strategies to advance effective written communication well into their future. This study examines and measures attitudes of UNO composition instructors – who come from a variety of pedagogical and theoretical backgrounds – toward the efficacy of UNO’s self-published Composition I textbook, From the Heartland: Critical Reading and Writing at UNO. In many ways, From the Heartland embraces what Richard Fulkerson refers to as “a critical cultural pedagogy” which encourages students to consider personal …

George Carter Collection, George Carter

Center for Restoration Studies Archives, Manuscripts and Personal Papers Finding Aids

No abstract provided.

Volume 36 - Full Volume

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

Volume 36 - Front Matter

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Richard E. Paine, Emily M. Cramer

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

Impact By Intention: An Argument For Forensics As A High-Impact Practice, Vincent L. Stephens

National Forensic Journal

This essay locates forensics within national discourse about high-impact practices (HIPs) in higher education, as outlined by scholar George D. Kuh. Forensics shares all the characteristics associated with the ten promising practices Kuh (2008) outlined initially. Though Kuh's original overview and expanded list of practices (Kuh, 2016) serve as reference points for addressing HIPs, forensics has not been recognized as a HIP. The essay argues that framing forensics as a HIP could enrich advocacy efforts to start and/or sustain current forensics programs. The article connects the fiscal climate with the assessment paradigm, examines the ways forensics adheres to Kuh's definition, …

How Can Sotl Help Forensic Educators Assess Their Performance?, Leah White

National Forensic Journal

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a movement among educators which seeks to acknowledge the work we do teaching as its own form of unique scholarship. SoTL argues the work we do as teachers can be peer-reviewed, critiqued and shared with others in our academic communities. The goal of this paper is to outline how forensic educators can use SoTL approaches to help build an argument about their scholarly activity as illustrated in coaching practice. SoTL provides a frame through which we can articulate the significance of this aspect of our scholarly performance.

Is It Prose Or Is It Drama? Distinguishing Events Based On Judging Criteria, Justin J. Rudnick, Anthony Peavy, Balencia Crosby, Alyssa Harter, Cristy Dougherty

National Forensic Journal

Genre distinctions have been a source of confusion and contention in the collegiate forensics community, particularly in terms of distinguishing between appropriate source material for prose and drama. As the most powerful indicators of current forensic performance evaluations, ballots help illustrate the judging paradigms shaping the community. To that end, we conducted a content analysis of preliminary-round prose and drama ballots from the 2014 NFA championship tournament to determine how judges distinguish between prose and drama. Results illustrate substantial similarities in how each event is evaluated by judges. We discuss implications for this distinction in the conclusion of this essay.

Automatically Extracting Meaning From Legal Texts: Opportunities And Challenges, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

This paper examines impressive new applications of legal text analytics in automated contract review, litigation support, conceptual legal information retrieval, and legal question answering against the backdrop of some pressing technological constraints. First, artificial intelligence (Al) programs cannot read legal texts like lawyers can. Using statistical methods, Al can only extract some semantic information from legal texts. For example, it can use the extracted meanings to improve retrieval and ranking, but it cannot yet extract legal rules in logical form from statutory texts. Second, machine learning (ML) may yield answers, but it cannot explain its answers to legal questions or …

Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

In this Article, we describe how to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to partially automate a type of legal analysis, determining whether a patent claim satisfies the definiteness requirement. Although fully automating such a high-level cognitive task is well beyond state-of-the-art AI, we show that AI can nevertheless assist the decision maker in making this determination. Specifically, the use of custom AI technology can aid the decision maker by (1) mining patent text to rapidly bring relevant information to the decision maker attention, and (2) suggesting simple inferences that can be drawn from that information.

We begin by summarizing the …

Ua12/2/28 Forensics Team, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the forensics / debate team.

Ua99/6/1 Bowling Green Business University Student Affairs Student Organizations, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by student organizations.

Ua1c11/93 Wku Forensics Team Photo Collection, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Photographs created by and about the WKU Forensics Team.

Fear, Power, & Teeth (2007), Olivia Hockenbroch

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Vagina dentata is the myth of the toothed vagina; in most iterations, it serves as a warning to men that women’s vaginas must be conquered to be safe for a man’s sexual pleasure (Koehler, 2017). The vagina dentata myth has been carried forth from ancient ancestors in numerous cultures all over the world (Koehler). It is one of many destructive cultural myths that guides discourses about sex and women’s bodies. In this paper, I explore a recent articulation of the myth, the 2007 film Teeth, and I argue that in this film, the vagina dentata is made more complicated. While …