Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

A Content Analysis Of Queer Slang On Tik Tok, Kuri Benitez

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Social media platforms’ concentration of diversity and interactions has accelerated the rate of cultural change on the Internet. With the rise of Tik Tok, a video-sharing social media platform, language used by marginalized groups is being incorporated into the platform’s slang due to the rapid rotation of trends. This study aims to provide data to a new field related to Tik Tok culture and the effects of trends on marginalized groups.

Using qualitative content analysis, this article studies an LGBTQ+-inspired Tik Tok trend to determine if the portmanteau of “-ussy”’s meaning has changed from its original use and if trends …

Developing Policies And Procedures For Restorative Accountability At Southwestern Assemblies Of God University, W. Lance Meche

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This project was designed to address a lack of policies and procedures at Southwestern Assemblies of God University that support its restorative accountability approach in addressing student conduct violations. The student handbook provides rights and responsibilities afforded each student as well as the procedures that appointed staff members are to follow in the event that campus policies are violated; however, the language used in the student handbook did not address modern student culture, nor did it procedurally assist staff members in helping students to develop spiritually. The project intervention involved staff members who address student violations with grace as well …

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 …

Designing A Program To Train Elders To Respond To #Metoo Experiences Of Adult Females In A Church Context, Jana H. Unruh

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This project intervention explores resolution of systemic issues of church-based sexual harassment, abuse, and violence, referred to as #MeToo, through design of a training program for elders. As theological foundation for the project, the Gospel of Luke frames positive approaches modern church leaders can align with in the quest for solutions to #MeToo. The Good Samaritan parable and the story of Mary and Martha extract valuable lessons for church elders addressing sexual harassment, abuse, and violence experiences of adult women. In Luke, we find fresh understanding for questions of #MeToo through the highly relevant concept of “neighbor.” Luke will …

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

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

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 …

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 …

“Finding A Balance”: User, Reader, And Learner Functions In First-Year Composition Textbook Engagement, Travis Vincent Holt

English Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative, multiple participant case study investigates the phenomenon of student textbook engagement in a First-Year Composition course at a private, evangelical four-year university. Shifting away from a dominant history where textbooks served as the primary object of study (Besser et al., 1999; Carr, Carr, & Schultz, 2005; Colby, 2013; Connors, 1987; Edwards, 1984; Faigley, 1992; Gale & Gale, 1999; Hawhee, 1999; Issitt, 2004; Miles, 2000; Ohmann, 1979; Rendleman, 2009, 2011; Welch, 1987), I answered calls (Colby, 2013; Harris, 2012; Rendleman, 2009, 2011) to examine engagement with textbooks in context. Additionally, scholars have dominated discussions of textbooks; thus, the student …

Digital Literacy Readiness Of First-Year Composition Students, Stephen Jantuah Boakye

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This is an inquiry into the digital literacy readiness of students of First-Year Composition (FYC). Using mixed methods, an online survey and interviews, the study maps out the digital literacy skills of FYC students and accounts for the people and places that contributed to the students' acquisition of those skills. As theoretical frameworks, the study used Eshet-Alkalai's (2002) digital literacy framework to account for the spectrum of students' functional digital literacy skills; Brandt's (1998) literacy sponsorship to scrutinize the persons who contributed to studentâ??s learning; and Hawisher and Selfe's (2004) technological gateways to make sense of the places that student …

Smartphones As The Tools For South Asian International Students To Navigate Academic And Non-Academic Sites In The U.S., Suresh Lohani

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation is invested in investigating how south Asian students from a Hispanic serving institution situated on a U.S. Mexico border use smartphone technologies to enhance their navigation of everyday sites in the U.S. This would primarily look at how South Asian international students from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Bhutan make use of smartphones to navigate different physical and virtual spaces, both academic and non-academic, to grapple with various complexities of their U.S. lives. The dissertation examines their user experiences and localization practices as they strive to acclimate to the U.S. setting, which to them is both physically and culturally …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Incorporating Wisdom Christology Into The Phronesis Of Courtyard Church Of Christ, Tiffany A. Dahlman

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project was to address an identified problem Courtyard Church of Christ members were having with decision-making in a way that promoted shalom and reflected Christ to the world. I proposed that Wisdom Christology could assist in the decision-making process and formed an intervention team of five additional people from within the congregation to explore the situation through participatory action research. We met for six sessions in the early months of 2020. The team embarked on a thorough examination of Wisdom Christology through the Scriptures climaxing in the Wisdom Hymn of Col 1:15–20. Our subsequent collective understanding …

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 …

Implementing Mindfulness-Based Interventions In The First-Year Composition Classroom As An Embodied Multimodality, Patricia Flores Hutson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

AbstractMindfulness is rapidly increasing its popularity amongst instructors and administrators in higher education (Bush, 2011; Egras, 2015; Egras and Hadars, 2019; Wenger, 2019). The simplicity of mindfulness makes it an inclusive practice that can be performed by every individual. Further, it is time and cost effective as it only requires a couple of minutes of class time. Studies focusing on implementing mindfulness specifically in writing and composition classes are scarce (Wenger, 2019; Consilio & Kennedy, 2019). This dissertation hopes to add to the growing research of mindfulness in higher education, specifically in writing classes, by exploring the ways in which …

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 …

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 …

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.

(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 …

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” …

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 …

Reference Management Software In The Classroom: Student Awareness, Knowledge, And Usage, Javier Cortez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research project examines the University of Texas at El Paso undergraduate students' general awareness, knowledge, and usage of reference management software (RMS). Moreover, an important aim of the project is to compare incoming and first-year college students (freshmen and sophomores) relationship to RMS against upper-level undergraduates (juniors and seniors). The project consisted of three phases, with a lecture on RMS and a pre-and post-lecture survey bookending the project. The principal investigator recruited 150 students from two different courses within the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at UTEP. Six classes were surveyed: four sections of RWS 1301 and two sections …

Constructing Meaning Through Textual And Visual Elements In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Sebastian Ezequiel Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Inspired by methods of meaning-making in comic books, this thesis answers the question of how First-Year Composition students make meaning out of textual and visual elements to understand the concepts of authorship and composition. The thesis begins with considering definitions of textual and visual elements in the context of how they are used as learning materials when paired together or when sharing characteristics. Following these definitions is a collection of scholarly examples about how visual elements have been used by students as rhetorical objects to aid in their understanding of course concepts. Teacher research was the chosen methodology for this …

Centering Silence: Graduate Student Instructors Negotiating Quiet In The Writing Classroom, Natalie Elise Taylor

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This IRB-approved project is a feminist qualitative study in which I seek to understand graduate student instructors' past and present, student and teacher, experiences with classroom silence. This research builds on the work of Mary Reda (Between Speaking and Silence), who, in interviewing quiet students about their reasons for being silent, sought to disrupt the overwhelmingly negative stories about classroom silence and quiet students that circulate amongst instructors. By having conversations with graduate student instructors about their relationship to student silence and their own silences, I further Reda's disruption. I am also influenced by Cheryl Glenn's positioning of silence as …

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 …

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. …

The Limits Of Critical Rhetoric: Towards A Postcritical Orientation, James Bezotte

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 1989, Raymie McKerrow’s essay “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis” served as a culmination for a new mode of rhetorical analysis that would reshape the field in the decades following. His essay combined the works of Michel Foucault and other rhetoric scholars such as Michael McGee, Maurice Charland, and Philip Wander to create the method of discourse critique called “critical rhetoric.” Essential to this practice are McKerrow’s equally important and interrelated “critique of domination,” “critique of freedom,” and “permanent criticism.” These components respectively help critics identify where social change should occur within discourses of power, motivate realignments of power for …

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, …

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 …