Digital Commons Network^™

Musical Rhetoric And Sonic Composing Processes, Kyle D. Stedman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is a study of musical rhetoric and music composition processes. It asks the questions, "How does the nature of music as sound-in-time affect its rhetorical functions, production, and delivery?" and "How do composers approach the task of communicating with audiences through instrumental music?" I answer these questions by turning to the history of musical rhetoric as practiced in the field of musicology and by interviewing composers themselves about their composition practices--approaches that are both underused in the rhetoric and composition community.

I frame my research participants' responses with a discussion of the different degrees to which composers try …

Global Csr And Photographic Credibility: Exploring How International Companies Portray Efforts Through Photographs In Csr Reports, Janel Lynn Norton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are living in the age of the visual. Imagery is an important element in constructing and deriving meaning through symbols, colors, and context. Images may hold persuasive power, be used as evidence, or simply provide a moment of beauty. Organizations rely on photographs to help them convey an image to their stakeholders within annual reports. Telling an organizations' story through photographs has become an intrinsic part of their efforts to convey sustainability. We live in the age of transparency, and organizations that construct an image that is not truthful will face consequences in today's socially connected and conscious world. …

Sellars In Context: An Analysis Of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works, Peter Jackson Olen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Wilfrid Sellars's work holds a prominent place in recent analytic philosophy, little work has been done to situate his early approaches to normativity and the philosophy of language in their proper context. What little work has been done tends to emphasize Sellars's connection to a then dominant logical empiricism at the expense of marginalizing other American philosophical schools. On top of this historical issue, most scholars attempting to explain Sellars's systematic philosophy tend to ignore a developmental picture of Sellars's positions and focus on explicating the systematic character of his thought. My dissertation attempts to correct both of these …

The War Of The Roses: Ritual Shaming, Morality, And Gender On The Radio, Jill M. Potkalesky

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I show how a current radio program, War of the Roses, acts as a ritual of shaming that affirms the social order as moral order, involving moral condemnation, degradation of social identity, and public embarrassment (Goffman, 1956, 1967; Turner 1987). I use discourse analysis (DA) (e.g., Bergmann, 1998; Tracy, 2001; Tracy & Mirivel, 2008) and membership categorization analysis (Baker, 2000; Roulston, 2001) to examine eight transcripts from multiple versions of the War of the Roses radio program across the country. The basic premise of the radio program War of Roses involves a "caller" who suspects her or …

Love And Risk: Intimate Relationships Among Female Sex Workers Who Inject Drugs And Their Non-Commercial Partners In Tijuana, Mexico, Jennifer L. Syvertsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of love and other emotions on sexual and drug-related HIV risk among female sex workers who inject drugs and their intimate, non-commercial partners in Tijuana, Mexico. My work on a public health study along the Mexico-U.S. border and independent ethnographic research in Tijuana suggests the importance of emotions in shaping sex workers' relationships and health risks.

Love is a universal human emotional experience embodied within broader cultural, social, and economic contexts. A growing body of cross-cultural research suggests that modern relationships have transformed to emphasize love and emotional intimacy over moral or kinship obligations. Particularly …

Moral Friction, Moral Phenomenology, And The Improviser, Benjamin Scott Young

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a phenomenology of that mode of self-interpretation in which it becomes possible for an interpreter to intentionally participate in the production of moral norms to which the interpreter himself or herself feels bound. Part One draws on Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" in order to thematize the phenomenon I call "moral friction"; a condition in which an interpreter becomes explicitly aware of the historical and cultural contingencies of their own moral vocabularies, practices, and concerns and as a result find themselves incapable of feeling the normative weight implicit in these. Part Two draws on Heidegger's existential …

Good Men Grow Corn: Embodied Ecological Heritage And Health In A Belizean Mopan Community, Kristina Linda Baines

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent developments in land rights and land use in the Toledo district, Belize has generated anthropological and activist interest surrounding traditional ecological knowledge and practice, and the role of heritage in communities. This study explores the connection between ecological knowledge and practices, and the concurrent construction of heritage, and community health and wellness, broadly defined. Developing and using the concept of "embodied ecological heritage," this dissertation takes a phenomenological approach to understanding the convergence of ecological heritage and health in multiple realms of everyday life, arguing that lived experience of participating in "traditional" practices is fundamentally connected to wellness in …

Perceptions Of Hispanic Female Esl Students Toward First-Year College Writing Courses: A Phenomenological Examination Of Cultural Influences, Barbara B. Booker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The role of culture as a phenomenon guided this qualitative study, which examined the influence of diverse Hispanic cultures on the attitudes and perceptions towards college writing courses of female Hispanic students who are non-native speakers of English. With the increasing number of Hispanic immigrants coming to the U.S., the minority student population at our nation's colleges and universities has also risen. Community colleges have become the means through which many of these Hispanic immigrants obtain a college education.

The eight women who participated in this study self-identified as Hispanic. All were first generation college students who had been born …

Strategizing Relationships 2.0: An Analysis Of International Companies' Use Of Social Media, Jessica Marie Brightman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Because of technological advances and the blurring of boundaries, the world is becoming a global community. Global communications have made it essential for multinational corporations to develop and maintain a consistent worldwide identity and brand image. It is no longer possible to classify people into simple and stable segments of customers; the world is evolving and so is the population. The purpose of this research is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional world of international public relations by expanding the stream of literature and incorporating a global aspect. Within the last few years, social media has seen …

Talking About Talk: The Problem Of Communication As An Object Of Study In Public Participation Research, Lauren Leigh Cutlip

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When citizens participate in risk assessment and decision-making for environmental and other issues that affect members of the public, more robust decisions may be made. Public participation in policy decisions is not only more democratic, but it also enables members of the public to contribute valuable expertise to the decision-making process. However, the development of an effective forum for such participatory projects has been difficult. Participation mechanisms that foster dialogue and interactive exchange between participants have been regarded as the most beneficial, but the practical application of these mechanisms has been observed to be problematic. The goal of this study …

Painting Puertorriqueñidad: The Jíbaro As A Symbol Of Creole Nationalism In Puerto Rican Art Before And After 1898, Jeffrey L. Boe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the three decades surrounding the Spanish-American war (1880-1910), three prominent Puerto Rican artists, Francisco Oller (1833-1917), Manuel E. Jordan (1853-1919), and Ramón Frade (1875-1954) created a group of paintings depicting "el jíbaro," the rural Puerto Rican farm worker, in a way that can be appropriately labeled "nationalistic." Using a set of motifs involving clothes, customs, domestic architecture and agricultural practices unique to rural Puerto Rico, they contributed to the imagination of a communal identity for creoles at the turn of the century. ("Creole" here refers to individuals of Spanish heritage, born on the island of Puerto Rico.) …

The Relationship Between The Social Construction Of Race And The Black/White Test Score Gap In, Toriano M. Dempsey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This research is an investigation into the relationship between the resegregation of American

public schools and the social creation of race. This research is based on the popular notion that

American public schools are failing to produce students capable of competing in today's global society.

The proof most often used to assert the failure of American public schools is the Black/White Test Score

Gap. For the purposes of this research the Black/White Test Score Gap is defined as the gap between

the scores on academic standardized tests between Black public school students and White public school

students regardless of …

Community As Metaphor: Dialectical Tensions Of A Racially Diverse Organization, Joseph Jacob Jenkins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, a sense of community has declined throughout the United States. Common Point Community Church has responded to this trend by prioritizing "community" as an organizational metaphor. The present study explores how this metaphor is co-constructed through the communication practices of current organizational leaders and members. I begin this process, first, by positioning the study within existing literature on institutional theory, institutional legitimacy, community, community of practice, social construction of race, sensemaking, organizational metaphor, tension-centered approach, and dialectic theory. Building upon more than three years of ethnographic field work, I then outline the study's context and methodology. Next, …

Teachers' Narratives Of Experience With Social Class, Natalie Elizabeth Keefer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Equality of educational opportunity has been a long elusive goal of public education in the United States. This narrative, phenomenological study conducted inquiry into how five teachers in Tampa, Florida construct meaning about social class and academic achievement based on their life experiences as members of a class-based society. Data produced descriptive, narrative stories that contextualize how meaning is constructed about social class based on participants' life experiences. This line of inquiry provides relevant insight into teachers' understandings of social class which may influence the provision of equal educational opportunities to all students. The following study includes a comprehensive analysis …

Semantic Feature Distinctiveness And Frequency, Katherine Marie Lamb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lexical access is the process in which basic components of meaning in language, the lexical entries (words) are activated. This activation is based on the organization and representational structure of the lexical entries. Semantic features of words, which are the prominent semantic characteristics of a word concept, provide important information because they mediate semantic access to words. An experiment was conducted to examine the importance of semantic feature distinctiveness and feature frequency in accessing the lexical representations of young and older adults in an off-line task using features of animals. The McRae, Cree, Seidenberg, and McNorgan (2005) feature norm corpus …

The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Recent Documentary Film And Video, Steven W. Schoen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Documentary is a genre of film that portrays "real" events using depictions that connote the objectivity and facticity implied by the processes of photorealism. Many contemporary documentary theorists and critics observe a constitutive problem in this ethos: despite the apparent constructions and agendas of documentary filmmaking, the framing and assumption of documentary as a window on the world tend to naturalize its own constructions as "real." Critics who engage documentary trace the multitude of ways this problem plays out in particular films. These projects yield many important insights, but they most often approach documentary as a form of inherently deficient …

Improvisational Music Performance: On-Stage Communication Of Power Relationships, David A. Steinweg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores how musical improvisational processes come into being through interacting discursive power relationships that are embodied and enacted through performance. By utilizing the concepts of framing and performativity I am able to show how discursive power constitutes the performance of improvisational music. To exemplify this theory, the project presents a case study examining a Grateful Dead cover band named Uncle John's Band that performs at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, FL. Using an ethnographic methodology, the project articulates the dominant discursive power relationships that constitute Uncle John's Band's improvisational performances. The dominant discursive power relationships revolve around the lived …

A Phenomenological Study Of Teaching Endangered Languages Online: Perspectives From Nahua And Mayan Educators., Dustin De Felice

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language and culture teaching has always been a complex and challenging task. For many educators, their teaching experiences are rooted in their earlier preparation, their classroom situations and their curriculum. In this study, indigenous educators recount their lived experiences with teaching their language and culture at a distance. These educators belong to either Nahua or Mayan speech communities where endangered languages are maintained. Using a transcendental phenomenological approach, my participants described and explained their perspectives and experiences with teaching, studying, and integrating technology. I focused the interviews, the reflective writing tasks and their artifact sharing on their experiences in an …

"Not If, But When": Sex, Risk, And Trust In Timing Gardasil Vaccine Decisions, An Exploratory Study Among Healthcare Providers And Middle-Class Parents In The U.S., Kathleen Marie Brelsford

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research explores how values regarding sexuality, morality, responsibility, protection, trust, and risk — expressed through parent, daughter, and healthcare provider relationships and interactions — inform parental decisions regarding the Gardasil® vaccine. In particular, the research examines the competing and conflicting meanings that parents and providers ascribe to vaccination and how actors position the vaccine within a wider set of negotiated, value–laden discourses. Because these narratives are situated within a larger structural field that shapes the landscape in which providers and parents interact, relevant historical and structural factors, including vaccine policy, cost, and compensation are discussed.

A Sociocultural-Theory-Based Study Of The Impact Of Mediation During Post-Observation Conferences On Language Teacher Learning, Jane Harvey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The post-observation conference offers a potentially fecund context for promoting language teacher learning, but very little research has been conducted into how this actually happens. Taking Vygotskian sociocultural theory as its theoretical framework, this study examined the mediational discourse of a series of post-observation conferences between a mentor and two practicing English language teachers to investigate the nature of the discourse and the relationship between the mediational discourse and the language teachers` learning. Features of mediational discourse identified a priori (such as intersubjectivity, graduated and contingent help, and externalization of reasoning) were present in the data, but were found to …

Investigating The Role Of The Internet In Women And Minority Stem Participation: A Case Study Of Two Florida Engineering Programs, Arland Nguema Ndong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite our awareness of the fascination modern humans have with the Internet, little is known about how and why colleges and universities create and maintain Websites. At the most general level, in this case study, I hypothesize that university Websites serve as communication and marketing tools in attracting students. At the most specific level, I postulate that civil engineering programs with Web pages depicting images of women and minorities would be more successful in recruiting and retaining women and students of color than civil engineering programs with Web pages displaying fewer or no images of women and minorities. The primary …

From Cosmogony To Anthropogony: Inscribing Bodies In Vedic Cosmogony And Samskara Rituals, Christine Boulos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the inscription of bodies is necessary in order to constitute the cosmos, gender and sex. A study of the Vedic cosmogonic mythologies of the deities Purusha and Prajapati illustrates the ways in which sacrifice, as a form of inscription, constitutes the cosmos by ordering and fashioning the boundaries of the bodies of the deities through differentiation and unification. An analysis of samskaras, or consecratory rites of The Law Code of Manu, show that they operate as regulatory norms in order to constitute sex and gender. But the instability and unnaturalness of the categories of gender and …

The Holistic Complementary Structure Of Western Bio-Medicine And Traditional Healing And Achieving Complete Health, Candace Gail Oubre

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Achieving complete health requires a deep understanding of complementary cultural competency sensitivity between physician and patient. This may include but is not limited to access to preventative health care resources, access to health educational resources and access to cultural healing resources, for example, shamans, Ayurvedic physicians, and herbal healers. Advocates of cultural competency emphasize great importance on knowledge of the patients' cultural background; however, the transcendence of this knowledge can be explained further through complementary cultural competency sensitivity. This is when the cultures of the physician and patient complement each other in terms of understanding what is in the patients' …

An Examination Of The Relationship Between Elementary Education Teacher Candidates' Authentic Assessments And Performance On The Professional Education Subtests On The Florida Teacher Certification Exam (Ftce), Thomas Raymond Lang Ii

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

According to Wilkerson and Lang (2003, p.1) with approximately "90% of schools, colleges, and departments of education using portfolios of one form or another as decision-making tools for standards-based decisions regarding certification or licensure (as well as NCATE accreditation), it is appropriate to explore the legal and psychometric aspects of this assessment device."

This study was conducted to examine how well the authentic assessments created in the Chalk and Wire ePortfolio initiative, which was created to provide authentic assessments of the Accomplished Practices, relate to the measures in the Professional Knowledge subtests on Florida Teacher Certification Examination.

The sample …

Historical Archaeology Of The Pine Level Site (8de14), Desoto County, Florida, Jana Futch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1866 the seat of Manatee County was moved to Pine Level, a newly-formed town in the wilderness of south Florida. By the 1880s, it contained stores, boardinghouses, churches, and government buildings. In 1887, Pine Level became DeSoto County’s first seat. However, when it lost county seat status to Arcadia only 18 months later, in 1888, Pine Level rapidly declined in population and importance, and eventually died out. The investigations of the Pine Level site detailed in this thesis were carried out as a public archaeology project, involving the DeSoto County Historical Society, University of South Florida, and the Florida …

Improvising Close Relationships: A Relational Perspective On Vulnerability, Nicholas A. Riggs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I study the way couples improvise relationships together. I define improvisation as a kind of performance that leads to an interpretive practice where people develop the meanings of their relationships as they perform. Participating in a performance ethnography, my romantic partner, myself, and three other couples reflect on the way we perform together on stage. Adapting the popular improv performance format “Armando” and utilizing post-performance focus groups, I observe how the couples strive to make meaning together and negotiate a joint-perspective about how they played. Ultimately, I argue that attending to the way a couple improvises their …

American Muslim Identities: A Qualitative Study Of Two Mosques In South Florida, Azka Mahmood Mahmood

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Most existing research on Muslims and transnational Islam originates from Europe. However, the Muslim population in Europe differs from American Muslims in a number of important ways. In this research I aim to address the general paucity in sociological literature that originates from the U.S. and focus on the mosque as a space where American Muslim identity forms and evolves for both first- and second-generation American Muslims. I examine two American mosques in South Florida as the sites of the development of American Muslim identities based on ethnographic data and participant interviews. I find that the research sites perform functions …

Modularizing Crosscutting Concerns In Software, Nalin Saigal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Code modularization provides benefits throughout the software life cycle; however, the presence of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) in software hinders its complete modularization. Traditional modularization techniques work well under the assumption that code being modularized is functionally orthogonal to the rest of the code; as a result, software engineers try to separate code segments that are orthogonal in their functionality into distinct modules. However, in practice, software does not decompose neatly into modules with distinct, orthogonal functionality. In this thesis, we investigate the modularization of CCCs in software using two different techniques.

Firstly, we discuss IVCon, a GUI-based tool that provides …

The State And The Legalization Of Dual Citizenship/Dual Nationality: A Case Study Of Mexico And The Philippines, Pamela Kim Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of how does the inclusion or exclusion of political participation with dual citizenship or dual nationality impact the Philippines' and Mexico's efforts to achieve the economic and political benefits of dual citizenship from their citizens?

The hypothesis of the paper states that that if a sending state offers legal dual citizenship/nationality with political participation, then it will be successful at increasing the economic and political benefits provided by its emigrants; but if a sending state only offers legal dual citizenship/nationality without political participation than it will not be successful at …

The Impact Of An Online Learning Community Project On University Chinese As A Foreign Language Students' Motivation, Shengrong Cai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study empirically investigated the impact of an online learning community project on university students' motivation in learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). A newly-proposed L2 motivation theory - the L2 motivational self system (Dörnyei 2005; 2009) - was used as the theoretical framework for this study. The three aspects of motivation (ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience), as described in this theory, were measured before and after the online project. Specific motivating and demotivating features of the online project were generated from participants' responses. Four individuals with different heritage and technology backgrounds were selected …