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 …

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 …

“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 …

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 …