Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Rhetorical Art Of Risk Assessment: Lessons From Risk Management In Rural And Tribal Communities, John L. Velat

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Risk assessment, mitigation, and communication rely on data from multiple sources to form a complete understanding of hazards and how to manage them. Experts can use these data to make informed decisions about the nature and extent of risks and inform the public to protect health, the environment, and economic welfare. However, in an effort to objectively make decisions, technical experts and policymakers increasingly rely on quantitative data as the most important determiner of risk, which can alienate the public, limit risk understanding, and delay or miss obvious signals of impending catastrophe. I examine several cases based on my experiences …

The Flight Attendants Of Academia: Liminality, Emotional Labor, And Feminization In Graduate Student Writing Program Administrators, Laura Vidal Chiesa

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Writing Program Administration (WPA) is an interdisciplinary field that addresses the management and development of writing programs in educational institutions. WPA entails writing instruction pedagogy, curriculum design, assessment, and faculty development pertaining to the teaching of writing. Graduate students in Humanities and English-based programs typically fill this position which can offer a career trajectory. However, the position is often experienced as demanding, unrewarding and does not deliver on the career-enhancing experience it seems to promise. Historically, this is unsurprising given that the position has been a subordinated role occupied by women in composition. And yet, the troubles besetting contemporary graduate …

Discourse, Materiality, And The Users Of Mobile Health Technologies: A Nigerian Case Study, Modupe Omolara Yusuf

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

mHealth, which is the use of mobile phones and other handheld information and communication technologies (ICTs), has been increasingly advocated as the solution to the problems, primarily infrastructure and personnel, facing the healthcare sector of many low-to-lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Following a series of United Nations Foundation research and advisory publications (in 2012, 2014 and 2016) arguing that mobile phones are approaching ubiquity in Nigeria and across the world, the UN strongly recommended that LMICs undertake mHealth initiatives. Subsequently, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) published a National Health ICT Strategic Framework (Strategic Framework), 2015-2020; the rallying call of …

Rhetoric Of Surrogacy: Re-Considering Agency Through Embodied Performance, Ann Kitalong-Will

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Surrogacy as a medical practice goes back, in a practical sense, to 1988, when the court case, “In the Matter of Baby M, A Pseudonym for an Actual Person,” was tried in the Supreme Court of New Jersey. At the heart of the issue, was the question of who Baby M’s legally-recognized mother was in the relationship between the contracting parents and the woman who gestated and gave birth to Baby M. Using this case as a jumping off point, this dissertation traces a history of surrogacy as a global industry. This project explores rhetorical agency in the embodied performance …

Chinese Women’S Reproductive Justice And Digital Technologies, Hua Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

It is well known that China has implemented a Family Planning policy. Chinese women have limited options in reproduction, and their agency is constrained by the government, the medical institutions, and the traditional Chinese patriarchal and biased culture. By utilizing rhetorical analysis as a primary methodology with a focus on rhetorical agency, this dissertation analyzes two cases where digital technologies such as social media and apps facilitate users’ rhetorical agency to counter instances of reproductive injustice. First, I focus on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app, Babytree, to examine how the app rhetorically positions its users to enable empowerment …

Digital Rhetoric Of Cosmopolitanism: A Case Study Of Thai Students At Michigan Technological University, Aranya Srijongjai

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation lies at the intersection of social sciences and humanities. It aims to examine digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism of people from a marginalized culture as situated in the context of a transnational experience. I view that this rhetoric encompasses digital practices of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan repertoire, a set of skills or strategies used in communication via social media in everyday life. I also argue that this rhetoric is connected to other elements in its broader social and cultural networks.

To illustrate these ideas, a case study of Thai students at Michigan Technological University in the United States is conducted …

“Because We Have Chosen A Life Of Peace”: A Quantitative And Qualitative Study Of Vegan Food Narratives, Silke H. Feltz

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Restaurants, grocery stores, fast food chains, and companies all over the United States introduce the consumer to more vegan products, dishes, and services than ever before. The rise of veganism therefore offers a rhetorical platform that should be studied. This dissertation discusses the rhetoric of veganism by analyzing food narratives of vegans through a critical intersectional lens and consists of three research stages. The first research stage investigates the narratology of Glenn Scott Lacey’s documentary, Vegan: Everyday Stories(2016). In particular, this rhetorical analysis focuses on the evaluative belief system of vegan storytelling by applying narrative and ideological criticism. The …

Ecologies Of Sponsorship: What Fitbit Users Can Teach Us About Digital Literacy, Kimberly Tweedale

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

As digital technologies have expanded, so have the literacy sponsors that support and shape how those technologies are used. This project focuses on one of these growing sites of sponsorship surrounding a specific health-tracking technology: wearable Fitbit devices. While much of the work on literacy sponsorship has focused on institutional sponsors as agents, I argue that the picture becomes more complicated and interesting when we place our focus on how users—often considered the sponsored—can become agents in a system that may have marginalized, excluded, or used them.

Using a combination of qualitative methods, this dissertation highlights how various literacy sponsors …

Articulating Digital Archival Practice Within Writing Program Administration: A Theoretical Framework, Amanda Girard

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Throughout Writing Program Administration scholarship there has been a clear call for archivization and archival work. This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to digital archival practices for Writing Program Administrators to consider and employ in their home institutions. While I recognize that WPAs are not typically identified as “archivists,” I situate the digital archive within the digital humanities as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project and offer suggestions that lead to recommendations for making an institutional archive. I review archival practice in order to justify the digital archive as an appropriate vehicle for WPAs’ work. Further, I argue that the digital …

Communicating The Health Impacts Of Climate Change: From Conviction To Persuasion, Emma Lozon

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Drawing on rhetorical theory as well as research in health and environmental communication, this thesis analyzes the effectiveness of messages that link climate change with health implications at moving audiences to persuasion. The two texts analyzed are a report produced by a group of physicians advocating for action on climate change and an episode from the Years of Living Dangerously Series. The findings indicate that communicators have the opportunity to frame climate-change-health messages in rhetorically sensitive ways that are more likely to empower audiences. Progressing from problems to solutions and to benefits of taking action can frame distressing health messages …

Accessing Library Space: Spatial Rhetorics From The U.S. To France And Back Again, Emily Simmons

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The exterior environments of libraries are sites rich for study, as they often hold histories of inequality that affect present-day access and use in complex, layered ways. The particularities of the environment through which community members pass before entering a library have an impact on the experience within the library. If libraries wish to remain public spaces dedicated to the strengthening of democracy, they should extend their focus beyond their walls to the surrounding neighborhood. This study puts into conversation the fields of spatial rhetorics, accessibility, and critical geography. Four topoi were developed to assess the accessibility of exterior library …

On The Same Page: Theory, Practice & The Ela Common Core State Standards, Jessica Lauer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This research sought to examine how writing was happening in high schools. States across the country, including Michigan, began implementing the Common Core State Standards in 2010. The standards place a heavy focus on informational texts particularly as a student reaches high school. The standards also suggest that writing should be a shared responsibility among teachers, acknowledging the importance of cross-disciplinary writing skills. Using a grounded theory approach to analyze the semi-structured interviews conducted with eight English teachers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this research revealed a disconnect between theory and practice when it comes to how educational standards …

A Pedagogy Of Witnessing: Linguistic And Visual Frames Of The Dark Side In The Multimodal Classroom, Lindsay Hingst

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

“A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Linguistic and Visual Frames of the Dark Side in the Multimodal Classroom,” focuses on the theoretical and practical benefits of implementing written, oral, and visual testimonies from traumatic history as a tool for teaching the importance of empathetic and ethical composition practices. Specifically, this dissertation provides resource material for a critical pedagogical model that supports “responsible witnessing” through short writing assignments and a final research project that analyze selected narratives, historical accounts, images, and films spanning World War II and the Vietnam War to more recent global events. My hope is that my work will be …

Language, Rhetoric, And Politics In A Global Context: A Decolonial Critical Discourse Perspective On Nigeria’S 2015 Presidential Campaign, Yunana Ahmed

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and hegemonic struggles are discursively constructed in Nigerian political campaign discourse. The data for this study come from two speeches delivered by former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 electoral campaign. This includes his declaration-of-intent speech and his speech marking the commencement of his formal campaign activities. My …

Efl Education In Mainland China: Word Memorization And Essay Writing Among High School Sophomores, Rehema Clarken

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation explores English as a Foreign Language instruction within the context of the contemporary Chinese education system. Basic outlines chart the historical development of EFL studies in the United States and China framing the question of what each community values as important measures of success when assessing language learning. While traditional Chinese methods value strict memorization of vast word lists (背单词, BeiDanCi, BDC) the US educational community stresses essay writing—particularly on standardized tests such as the ACT, SAT, and TOEFL, which are required for university admissions. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and writing ability among …

Personas: A Strategy For More Inclusive And Usable Reproductive Health Tracking Technologies, Anna R. Paul

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this report, I argue for the inclusion of personas in the development process of technologies that are designed to allow users to collect and track their health information. Personas provide a profile of a user and their needs, goals, and contexts. This tool can help designers to better understand their users, in order to create better, more usable end products. I examine one particular self-tracking technology, smartphone applications that allow users to record information about their menstrual cycles. Many of the most popular period tracking applications available today only meet the needs of a narrow user group, resulting in …

Engaging Practice In Communication Education: Institutional Politics, Knowledge Economy, And State Power, Wincharles Coker

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

A grave concern in communication education scholarship is that research in practice plays second fiddle to theory. Little is known about the phenomenology of practice in communication pedagogy, and how it shapes and is shaped by programmatic assessment in particular. This dissertation attempts to explore the complexity of practice in communication education in a non-Western culture. The project demonstrates that the organizational culture that gives rise to the work of communication program administrators is always filtered and enacted through the interplay of institutional politics, the global knowledge economy, and state power. Using two public universities in Ghana, I argue, based …

Clusivity In Presidential Discourse: A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis Of State-Of-The-Nation Addresses In Ghana And The United States, Stephen K. Dadugblor

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis examines the ways in which rhetors in presidential discourse simultaneously associate with and dissociate from their audiences in an attempt to consolidate power while subtly masking their actions. Drawing on comparative rhetoric and Andrus’ (2013) Rhetorical Discourse Analysis (RDA) that combines rhetoric and (critical) discourse analysis, I analyze the expressive values of selected lexical items, and the inclusive and exclusive uses of “we” in selected State of the Nation/Union Addresses in Ghana and the United States. I argue that presidents’ unique position during these speeches as both heads of nations and heads of their political parties presents a …

Building A Discourse: Bridging The Gap Between New Media's Convergence And Rhetoric And Composition's Multimodality, Katherine G. Aho

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

My dissertation emphasizes the use of narrative structuralism and narrative theories about storytelling in order to build a discourse between the fields of New Media and Rhetoric and Composition. Propp's morphological analysis and the breaking down of stories into component pieces aides in the discussion of storytelling as it appears in and is mediated by digital and computer technologies. New Media and Rhetoric and Composition are aided by shared concerns for textual production and consumption.

In using the notion of "kairotic reading" (KR), I show the interconnectedness and interdisciplinarity required in the development of pedagogy utilized to teach students to …

The Fanned Flames Of Discontent: A Solidarity-Inspired History Of The Identity/Ideology, Cultural History, And Rhetorical Strategies Of The Wobblies During The 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike, Gary Kaunonen

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Rooted in critical scholarship this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study, which contends that having a history is a basic human right. Advocating a newly conceived and termed, Solidarity-inspired History framework/practice perspective, the dissertation argues for and then delivers a restorative voice to working-class historical actors during the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodological framework the dissertation combines research methods from the Humanities and the Social Sciences to form a working-class history that is a corrective to standardized studies of labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Oftentimes class interests and power relationships determine the dominant …

Reclaiming Indigenous Narratives Through Critical Discourses And The Autonomy Of The Trickster, Robert D. Hunter

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

How do prevailing narratives about Native Americans, particularly in the medium of film, conspire to promote the perspective of the dominant culture? What makes the appropriation of Indigenous images so metaphorically popular? In the past hundred years, little has changed in the forms of representation favored by Hollywood. The introductory chapter elucidates the problem and outlines the scope of this study. As each subsequent chapter makes clear, the problem is as relevant today as it has been throughout the entire course of filmic history.

Chapter Two analyzes representational trends and defines each decade according to its favorite stereotype. The binary …

On The Digital-Political Topography Of Music, Daniel William Lawrence

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The persuasive power of music is often relegated to the dimension of pathos: that which moves us emotionally. Yet, the music commodity is now situated in and around the liminal spaces of digitality. To think about how music functions, how it argues across media, and how it moves us, we must examine its material and immaterial realities as they present themselves to us and as we so create them. This dissertation rethinks the relationship between rhetoric and music by examining the creation, performance, and distribution of music in its material and immaterial forms to demonstrate its persuasive power. While …

A Phenomenology Of Mimetic Learning And Multimodal Cognition: Integrating Experiential Knowledge Into Programs In Rhetoric, Composition, And Technical Communication, Kevin R. Cassell

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

My dissertation emphasizes a cognitive account of multimodality that explicitly integrates experiential knowledge work into the rhetorical pedagogy that informs so many composition and technical communication programs. In these disciplines, multimodality is widely conceived in terms of what Gunther Kress calls “socialsemiotic” modes of communication shaped primarily by culture. In the cognitive and neurolinguistic theories of Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, however, multimodality is described as a key characteristic of our bodies’ sensory-motor systems which link perception to action and action to meaning, grounding all communicative acts in knowledge shaped through body-engaged experience. I argue that this “situated” account of …

Veteranness : Representations Of Combat-Related Ptsd In U.S. Popular Visual Media, Diane J. Keranen

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Posttraumatic stress and PTSD are becoming familiar terms to refer to what we often call the invisible wounds of war, yet these are recent additions to a popular discourse in which images of and ideas about combat-affected veterans have long circulated. A legacy of ideas about combat veterans and war trauma thus intersects with more recent clinical information about PTSD to become part of a discourse of visual media that has defined and continues to redefine veteran for popular audiences.

In this dissertation I examine realist combat veteran representations in selected films and other visual media from three periods: …

Students’ Rhetorical Strategies In Translingual Encounters On Campus, Laura Moeller

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This thesis examines the ways in which linguistic minority students assert themselves as rhetorical agents when faced with the expectation of impromptu verbal responses. Based on a study that aims at identifying specific rhetorical strategies these students employ, the goal of this thesis is to theorize ways in which linguistic minorities deal with the challenges of fast-paced, high-stakes interactions. The practices that emerge from data analysis suggest that such strategies tend to be reactive rather than proactive and highly dependent on context. While they are valuable ways for linguistic minorities to navigate their ways in specific moments, the thesis argues …

Resilient Women, Metistic Scientists: A Multiple Case Study Of How Women Negotiate Their Situatedness In Science Fields, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The concept of feminist metistic resilience postulates that the voiceless, the marginalized and the minority in societies employ strategies in order to turn tables in their favor. This study presents a qualitative analysis of how women, considered to be the minority, negotiate their situatedness in science fields in order to effect change in their lives or that of the society and why they become successful. By “situatedness,” I refer to the everyday life of women as they live and encounter people, society and culture, especially, the life of women who have transcended the culturally stipulated role of women and are …

Deconstructing Definitions: Repositioning Technological Access & Literacy Within Agent Ability, Carole Reynolds

Department of Humanities Publications

Our society cannot have concerns about access without literacy because they are congruous; neither is distinct nor complete without the other in technological contexts. The United States Department of Education repeatedly calls for more, better, and increased access and literacy to technologies. Our elected officials make national speeches imparting similar rhetoric and ideas. A problem with this particular information dissemination by inherently powerful entities or persons is they make assumptions of what access and literacy are, with minimal definition, and virtually no context of agent ability with technology. These ambiguous terms and deficient definitions have subsequently proliferated in academic scholarship, …

Governmentality In Higher Education : A Critical Analysis Of The National Survey Of Student Engagement (Nsse), Bonnie B. Gorman

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In this dissertation, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) serves as a nodal point through which to examine the power relations shaping the direction and practices of higher education in the twenty-first century. Theoretically, my analysis is informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality, briefly defined as a technology of power that influences or shapes behavior from a distance. This form of governance operates through apparatuses of security, which include higher education. Foucault identified three essential characteristics of an apparatus—the market, the milieu, and the processes of normalization—through which administrative mechanisms and practices operate and govern populations. In this project, …

Life-Patterns On The Periphery : A Humanities Base For Development Imperatives And Their Application In The Chicago City-Region, Kevin Hodur

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Life-Patterns on the Periphery: A Humanities Base for Development Imperatives and their Application in the Chicago City-Region is informed by the need to bring diverse fields together in order to tackle issues related to the contemporary city-region. By honouring the long-term economic, social, political, and ecological imperatives that form the fabric of healthy, productive, sustainable communities, it becomes possible to setup political structures and citizen will to develop distinct places that result in the overlapping of citizen life patterns, setting the stage for citizen action and interaction.

Based in humanities scholarship, the four imperatives act as checks on each other …

Interrogating The Spaces Of Personal Photography : Women, Identity, And The Cultural Formation Of Photographic Practice, Christine Garceau

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Personal photographs permeate our lives from the moment we are born as they define who we are within our familial group and local communities. Archived in family albums or framed on living room walls, they continue on after our death as mnemonic artifacts referencing our gendered, raced, and ethnic identities. This dissertation examines salient instances of what women “do” with personal photographs, not only as authors and subjects but also as collectors, archivists, and family and cultural historians. This project seeks to contribute to more productive, complex discourse about how women form relationships and engage with the conventions and practices …