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Rethinking Metaphor In The Rhetoric Of Alzheimer's Disease, Evelyn Saru Jimmy 2022 The University of Texas at El Paso

Rethinking Metaphor In The Rhetoric Of Alzheimer's Disease, Evelyn Saru Jimmy

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the metaphors that early onset Alzheimer's blog authors use to make meaning of their experiences living with Alzheimer's disease (AD). To complicate the study, I also compare whether early onset Alzheimer's blog authors use the same metaphors with those who serve as caregiver to late-stage AD patients. This research project is situated within the overlap fields of Disability Studies (Dolmage, 2006; Lewiecki-Welson, 2003; Yergeau, 2014; Kerschbaum, 2014), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (Segal, 1997: Price, 2011; Molloy, 2015) Rhetoric of Mental Health (Chrisman, 2008; Uttapha, 2017, Reynold, 2008), and Technical Communication (Meloncon, 2014). Following the principles of …


The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh 2022 Chapman University

The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh

English (MA) Theses

Medical imaging devices have enabled doctors to render images of the brain without cutting into the body. These images are colloquially called “brain scans.” Through journalism and mass dissemination online, brain scans have become an example of Michael Calvin McGee’s “ideograph,” a language term that subtly takes on outsized political and symbolic meaning to enforce state power. In conversation with theories of new materialism, I situate the brain scan as an ideograph within Jenny Edbauer’s model of rhetorical ecologies. The rhetorical force of the brain scan comes out of a collision between René Descarte’s mind/body dualism, the medical model of …


Zapatista Maya Literacies And Decolonial Civic Pedagogies, Juan Moisés García-Rentería 2022 The University of Texas at El Paso

Zapatista Maya Literacies And Decolonial Civic Pedagogies, Juan Moisés García-Rentería

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Zapatista Maya Literacies and Decolonial Civic Pedagogies evaluates an educational outreach project led by an Indigenous grass roots mobilization in the high plateau of central México, the Zapatista movement. Using retrospective narrative inquiry and theoretically informed perspectives, this dissertation shows that the program of the Zapatista escuelita, Spanish for “little school,” is rooted in the Maya educational paradigm of nojptesel-p’ijubtasel, a cultural and political process of socialization at the heart of contemporary Maya peasant families. The research focus of this study offers rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies two interrelated points of insight tied to the overall Maya conception of the …


Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp 2022 University of Louisville

Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how medieval authors defined rhetoric and depicted rhetorical practice in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. It begins by analyzing how the field of medieval rhetorical historiography has overlooked the Fürstenspiegel as a rhetorical genre due to its overt reliance on meta-rhetorical handbook genres as the objects of its analysis. This dissertation challenges traditional narratives that positions medieval rhetoric as a primarily academic discipline divorced from political practice by engaging in horizontal reading practices that examine the broader culture of medieval rhetorical practice alongside the definitions of rhetoric found in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. In so doing, this dissertation …


Speech Acts As Contingent Encounters: Realizing Agency In Contaminated Worlds, Zachary Cross 2022 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Speech Acts As Contingent Encounters: Realizing Agency In Contaminated Worlds, Zachary Cross

Honors Theses

Agency is realized in the act of speaking, an act which is always contingent on a collaborative process that transforms all parties involved. We think and act with one another and our concepts, there is no act of speech prior to encounter. In this paper I explore different ways which language shapes our thinking and play with those structures to use them as models for realizing agency. This exploration became personal insofar as exploring ways of thinking transformed my own sense of agency in the speech act. The completion of this paper is thus essential to its conclusion.


Hot Licks And Rhetoric: Collecting, Community, And Disruptive Literacies, Joseph P. Serio 2022 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Hot Licks And Rhetoric: Collecting, Community, And Disruptive Literacies, Joseph P. Serio

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnographic dissertation investigates the activities and tactical technical communications (TTC) of underground music collectors. Through this it explores the concepts of community and institution that compositionists and technical writing scholars use as ways to address social influences on writing, but which fail to explain how these milieus influence the writers and their genres. Collectors of Recordings of Independent Origin (ROIOs), through the use of increasingly disruptive technologies, moved from passive listeners to active producers of music for sharing freely, garnering opposition from the music industry as their activities moved online. This study views the relationship between the music industry, …


Seeking Justice And Effecting Organizational Change: Kategoria As A Form Of Rhetorical Leadership, Marnie Lawler McDonough 2022 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Seeking Justice And Effecting Organizational Change: Kategoria As A Form Of Rhetorical Leadership, Marnie Lawler Mcdonough

Theses and Dissertations

Organizational scandals at both the institutional and leadership levels abound in society, and, with growing platforms and forums to level allegations, public accusations by myriad individuals have increased. As an understudied genre, kategoria, or speeches of accusation, should be considered for their ability to influence change. In this study, I argue that kategoria can be employed as a form of rhetorical leadership and utilized as a tool to disrupt value hierarchies and, thus, effect organizational change. This investigation assumes a genre analysis to move beyond establishing accusation simply as a classification of forensic rhetoric but to illustrate that the generic …


It's All Fun And—: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Space In The Pandemic., Erica Von Proctor Lewis 2022 University of Louisville

It's All Fun And—: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Space In The Pandemic., Erica Von Proctor Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This exhibition and document explore spatial rhetoric during the pandemic, utilizing materiality and relational aesthetics to reflect on the different ways in which the public and private are made distinct from one another. In doing so, Lewis addresses new cultural navigations of shared spaces, both digital and corporeal, public and private. In addition, the artist also examines the faulty social and institutional systems that the pandemic brought to light, such as socioeconomic dynamics and voter suppression, while utilizing Kenneth Burke’s concept of the terministic screen. Games are a central theme throughout the exhibition, as they are often coded as “home” …


Authorial Agency: Investigating Composition Pedagogies Under A New Lens, Tyler Hurst 2022 Utah State University

Authorial Agency: Investigating Composition Pedagogies Under A New Lens, Tyler Hurst

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This essay considers the work of three prominent composition scholars through the lens of authorial agency, which I define as a form of agency that focuses on the individual voice and self-determination of students in the writing space. Though the concept of agency has been previously considered by composition scholars, this contribution might aid in understanding various pedagogical approaches by analyzing how authorial agency is already being engaged within composition pedagogies and investigating how authorial agency aids teachers in understanding their pedagogy so that students learn to take back control of their own authoritative voice and self-determination. By re-investigating …


Female Superheroes, Rhetorical Reading, And Feminist Imagination : A Study Of College-Aged Readers And Comic Book Reading Practices Using Eye Tracking And Cued Retrospective Interviews, Aimee Vincent 2022 University at Albany, State University of New York

Female Superheroes, Rhetorical Reading, And Feminist Imagination : A Study Of College-Aged Readers And Comic Book Reading Practices Using Eye Tracking And Cued Retrospective Interviews, Aimee Vincent

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation uses feminist analysis and rhetorical genre studies to analyze the strategies used by college-aged students to read female superhero comic books. The dissertation responds to the growing trend of literature and writing instructors assigning comic books and graphic novels under the untested assumption that these texts are readily accessible to college students. This assumption contradicts what we have learned from studies of rhetorical reading strategies that found that readers analyze texts most effectively when readers are familiar with the text’s genre. In addition, the assumption ignores the specific rhetorical contexts of comics, including a problematic but powerful narrative …


Social Change Through Rhetorical Action: Case Studies Of Two Tennessee Women In The Archives, Dalton Burks 2022 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Social Change Through Rhetorical Action: Case Studies Of Two Tennessee Women In The Archives, Dalton Burks

Honors Theses

In conversations about social change and activism, the American South is rarely represented as a place where such change occurs. However, this analysis will focus on two unlikely activists who used their writing and voices to advocate for change on a local scale in their individual communities. These activists are Emma Bell Miles, an artist, naturalist, and creative writer from Chattanooga, Tennessee who wrote a persuasive column in the Chattanooga News on feminism and naturalism, and Mary Cunningham, a local librarian and mother from McMinnville, Tennessee who created the Magness Library and Community House. This thesis argues that Miles and …


Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk 2022 East Tennessee State University

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …


(De)Legitimizing Genres: Rhetoric And Tactical Institutional Critique., Walker Smith 2022 University of Louisville

(De)Legitimizing Genres: Rhetoric And Tactical Institutional Critique., Walker Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation forwards a rhetorical theory of institutions that centers their genre-based communications, redefines institutions in relation to organizations, and contributes to the field’s understanding of how communities collaboratively rewrite entrenched institutionalized practices from the outside, thus reducing the harm that institutions can enact. Using evangelical church policies on marriage as a case study, I answer the following questions: How do historically sedimented institutions, their genres, and their practices rhetorically impose, legitimize, and regulate certain patterns of social life? How does an evangelical Christian church manage to govern the gendered and sexual lives of their members and maintain their power …


Innately American, Black America’S Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Black Death & Identity, Montéz Jennings 2022 Chapman University

Innately American, Black America’S Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Black Death & Identity, Montéz Jennings

English (MA) Theses

In 2015, Baltimore city erupted after the death of Freddie Carlos Gray. He was a 25-year-old who was forcibly placed into the back of a police van and after riding in the van, sustained several injuries that resulted in his death. After the video footage was shown to the public, a tension bubbled in the air that cause what seemed like weeklong protests and riots. The event is now referred to as the “Baltimore Uprising.” When he died, it was like a portion of each of us died. It was another narrative added to the cultural collective of Black faces …


Narrating Madness: Building Narratives Against Privileged Identity, Kristin Santa Maria 2022 Clemson University

Narrating Madness: Building Narratives Against Privileged Identity, Kristin Santa Maria

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines how competing narratives related to madness and mental health can provide insight into the inconsistencies of preconceived biases that tie into privilege and power. These biases relate to identities associated with race, gender, class, and embodiment. By exploring madness narratives, we can see how madness often becomes a quality used to isolate and “other” people that act against typical societal and cultural norms. Works of fiction and nonfiction that pertain to madness narratives can either be used to perpetuate stereotypes of normalcy or as a vehicle to allow for a more open and frank discussion of madness …


Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves 2022 Clemson University

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …


Developing Practices Within The Lord’S Supper That Develop Central Identity At Queen City Church Of Christ, Ryan Russell 2022 Abilene Christian University

Developing Practices Within The Lord’S Supper That Develop Central Identity At Queen City Church Of Christ, Ryan Russell

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This project was designed to meet a need at the Queen City Church of Christ (QCC) for developing intentional practices around the Lord’s Supper for forming a central identity in a diverse community. The scope of this project focuses on the project group’s ability to develop practices based on the theology of the Lord’s Supper, biblical teaching, engaging in practices of spiritual formation as a group, and their observations of Lord’s Supper practices in other Christian traditions. Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth provides the textual context for the discussion of the role the Lord’s Supper plays within …


Reading With Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading In A Challenging Age, Miranda L. Egger 2022 Old Dominion University

Reading With Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading In A Challenging Age, Miranda L. Egger

English Theses & Dissertations

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a classroom-based intervention meant to challenge how educators in rhetoric and composition/writing studies might directly address the acute and exigent discursive struggle in the first-year composition classroom. This study ultimately finds that social, digital annotation invites significant shifts in students’ reading habits, in that Hypothes.is-based annotations yielded a far more complex, multifaceted set of reading skills, behaviors, …


Addressing Public Perceptions About Cell-Based Meat And Cellular Agriculture Through Metaphors, Yvette Emma Hubbard 2022 Old Dominion University

Addressing Public Perceptions About Cell-Based Meat And Cellular Agriculture Through Metaphors, Yvette Emma Hubbard

English Theses & Dissertations

Today’s food movement places organic, holistic, and natural foods as priority. The idea aims for better human health, a farm-to-table community, and environmental sustainability. Soon a new meat alternative will become part of the ongoing food movement. What is it? Cell-based protein. It is a protein alternative to livestock protein. It is real protein from a real breathing animal. Cell-based beef for example is grown in a lab with cells from a living cow that does not have to die or be slaughtered. It is destined to become the new protein architecture on the horizon. Parts of this paper are …


Fragmentation In The Dual Enrollment Experience: The Importance Of Students’ Self-Perceptions In Dual Enrollment First-Year Composition Students, Sarah Crystal Johnson 2022 Old Dominion University

Fragmentation In The Dual Enrollment Experience: The Importance Of Students’ Self-Perceptions In Dual Enrollment First-Year Composition Students, Sarah Crystal Johnson

English Theses & Dissertations

Dual enrollment has become an embedded aspect of our writing programs yet is still an under-researched area within rhetoric and composition. One reason for this research gap is that many DE students experience their FYC courses on secondary campuses, liminal spaces that are more difficult to access for research. DE students within these spaces experience daily tensions between the collegiate expectations of FYC curriculum and the secondary social contexts in which their DE FYC courses are taught. These unique contextual experiences impact their perceptions of themselves as writers. This research is an attempt to step into this DE research gap …


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