Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Moderation As Resistance: A Study Of Aggression And Response On Twitch.Tv, Tab Marie London

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores content moderation as a form of resistance to online aggression and harassment, essentially asking the question “How do live streamers on Twitch address aggression through moderation?” Although much research in the fields of rhetoric and composition has addressed online aggression, platform affordances, and rhetorical resistance, Twitch—it’s rhetors, audiences, and communities—is understudied. Through the use of five case studies focusing on women, POC, and LGBTQ+ streamers, this dissertation examines streamer and community responses to aggression and highlights examples of unruly rhetoric (callouts, mockery, shame, jokes, etc.), which served to combat aggression, establish and reinforce community boundaries, and strip …

Rednecks, Hillbillies, And White Trash In The Living Room: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Reality Television's Construction Of Appalachian Regional Identity, Bradlee Elizabeth Hartman

Senior Independent Study Theses

Reality television is one of America’s guiltiest pleasures because it lets us peer into the lives of people who are both similar to and different from us. However, the narratives we see on the small screen are far from innocent; in fact, reality television plays a large role in directing how we make sense of the world and our place within it. To that end, this study examines how MTV’s reality television series, Buckwild, constructs a particular view of Appalachian regional identity. This study utilizes ideological criticism to uncover how MTV engages in continued stereotyping of Appalachian people. Specifically, my …

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 …

The Rhetoric Of Jimmy Carter: Renewing America’S Confidence In Civic Leadership Through Speech And Political Education, Christopher Bondi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

July 15, 2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of President Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, a catalyst for what became an often overlooked yet significant turning point in the nation’s history. Carter’s words were both poignant and pointed as he calmly, yet directly, addressed the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and engagement in narcissistic practices that led to a coveting of material goods. In an examination of the events that shaped this historical moment, this dissertation contends that, despite President Carter’s attempt to steer America in a more environmentally and socially conscious direction, the nation instead acquiesced to Ronald Reagan’s …

A Catholic Ethic For Smartphones In Tanzania, Faustine Tarimo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project is a synthesis of Church documents and papal encyclicals to form a Catholic ethic for the smartphone use in Tanzania. The research question for this project is how a Catholic communication ethic shapes the use of smartphones for human communication in Tanzania. The problem I want to address is the perceived danger of losing connectivity or ‘real’ face-to-face encounters between people in “let’s talk culture” in Tanzania. The goal of this project is to appreciate the use of smartphones, at the same time to attend to a Catholic ethic to integrate into a “let’s talk culture” some digital …

#Metoo: Why Twitter Doesn't Do Enough, Tara Mann

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

In 2017 actress Alyssa Milano sparked the #MeToo movement as most people know it today. Unbeknownst to many, however, a black woman named Tarana Burke began the Me Too movement a decade earlier after working with survivors of sexual assault. As more and more injustice through discrimination comes to light, it is important to recognize privilege where it exists and what it allows to happen. This project is an analysis of the rhetoric of the #MeToo movement that aims to prove that this privilege is the problem with the movement. I intend to demonstrate how the use of Twitter to …

Climate Change Games As Boundary Objects: Fostering Dialogic Communication Within Stakeholder Engagement, Megan L. Mckittrick

English Theses & Dissertations

Rising waters and the increasing devastation of flood events make coastal resilience a significant issue in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, particularly in the city of Norfolk. Enhancing resilience requires ongoing stakeholder engagement designed to invite dialogue while encouraging cross-jurisdictional collaboration and comprehensive problem-solving. Climate change games have been employed to support these endeavors. This dissertation provides a response to the following research questions: 1) What is the origin of the climate change game genre? 2) Why are key stakeholders in coastal resilience using climate change games? And 3) how do these games operate for these key stakeholders? To …

Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

There are apparent similarities between Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. However, this thesis will demonstrate that they share more than similar subject matter and yet differ in substantial ways. Utilizing Black feminist theory and alternative rhetoric this thesis examines how Gomez and Butler harness the potential of speculative fiction to critique the world around them and imagine an alternative world for those who are intersectionally marginalized.

The Power Of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach To Comic Studies, Stephanie N. Phillips

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand how an image becomes a meaning-making actant. By tracing the lifecycle of an image starting with its production, I analyze how the image changes and transforms as it circulates and enters into new and sometimes unexpected relationships. Specifically, I look at the NC logo, an image found in the popular comic book Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro. The NC logo, which stands for “non-compliant,” is a fictitious symbol used on prisoner uniforms in the science-fiction comic series, and marks women who have failed to conform to societal guidelines set by …

Chicanx Murals: Decolonizing Place And (Re)Writing The Terms Of Composition, Nora K. Rivera

English Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creating co-composed knowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztec tlacuilolitztli practice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

Communication In The Ruins: Walker Percy And The Art Of Symbolic Mediation, Justin Bonanno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes to explore the mediating function of the symbol through the work of Walker Percy. In the first chapter, I provide the necessary background for undertaking this project. First, I situate Percy in his historical moment and review key events in his life that helped to shape his philosophy of communication. Second, I sketch out some of the primary coordinates in Percy’s thought. Percy’s hermeneutic of the self requires an understanding of the difference between sign and symbol, dyadic and triadic events, environment and world, and immanence and transcendence. Third, I review some of the key intersections with …

The Banality Of The Social: A Philosophy Of Communication Of Social Media Influencer Marketing, Kati Sudnick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project engages in a philosophy of communication approach in order to understand the role of social media influencer marketing within a historical moment defined via Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the social. Social media influencer marketing emerges as a new form of celebrity endorsement in which those finding fame on the Internet engage in word-of-mouth marketing for brands and organizations on their own personal social media pages, blurring the line between organic and sponsored content. According to Arnett (2010), philosophy of communication acts as a background road map for understanding foreground public action. Utilizing a myriad of metaphorical coordinates as …

Murmurs Of Revolution: Mythical Subversion In Dostoevsky, Connor Guetersloh

English (MA) Theses

Throughout history, revolutions have been plagued by unpredictability; it is all but impossible to know when cultural systems will be turned on their heads. Is there a common motivator, to predict social unrest bubbling beneath the surface of society? I suggest the development of this motivator is detectable by deconstructing Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic patterns within the field of rhetorical mythology. “Mythology,” in the rhetorical and linguistic sense developed by Roland Barthes, is the study of a collective system of thinking we subconsciously subscribe to when interpreting meaning, perpetuated by greater society. The struggle for meaning is split into the …

Powerful Men: An Evaluation Of Successful Rhetoric, Rachel Hollenbeck

Undergraduate Research Journal

This study examines the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill and why it was so successful. Both men are famous for their rhetoric, but this study is a more in-depth look at how they spoke well and influenced people. Through the lens of Lloyd F. Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation” and the classical rhetorical appeals, multiple details of Hitler and Churchill’s speeches are brought to attention and analyzed, especially how their responses fit the situations they were facing, how they connected with their audiences, and how their wording matched the goals they were trying to achieve. One of the purposes …

Critical Language Awareness Pedagogy In First-Year Composition: A Design-Based Research Study, Megan Michelle Weaver

English Theses & Dissertations

In this design-based research (DBR) study, I collaborated with two first-year composition (FYC) instructors in designing and implementing Critical Language Awareness (CLA) pedagogy to promote students’ linguistic consciousness while strengthening and enhancing their postsecondary writing skills. I designed and implemented this study by drawing on a critical theory of language, informed by literature on language ideologies (Silverstein, 1979; Irvine & Gal, 2000; Kroskrity, 2010) and raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim, 2016), and a critical theory of pedagogy, informed by literature on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970, 1973; Giroux, 2011) and critical race pedagogy (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn, 1999). After …

Resisting ‘Raid-And-Rescue’: Capturing The Ideograph Of Victimhood In Nevada Law A.B. 166, Samantha Thies

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Critical rhetoricians and legal communication studies scholars have long recognized that rhetoric and ideology are inherent to legal structures, shaping legislation and impacting the lives of those such laws are meant to address. Fewer look to, not just civic discourses, but also the vernacular discourse surrounding such institutions, shaping the ideologies that support it. There is a need, however, for the study of outlaw discourses to both help define ideographs and challenge their very existence through contrasting outlaw and hegemonic logics. Thus, this thesis examines debates over A.B. 166, a Nevada state law meant to alleviate sex trafficking, by establishing …

Collaboration In The Technical Communication Classroom: Negotiating Team Contracts In A Pwi, Alyssa Herman

Theses and Dissertations

As TPC teacher-scholars, we must acknowledge the overwhelming Whiteness of our field and the racism, ableism, and sexism inherent in our institutions. We must actively work toward inclusivity and socially just collaborations in our classrooms by encouraging dominant-identified students to confront their privileges and implicit biases in order to better engage with historically marginalized students. With that said, this thesis examines how teacher-scholars might take up a cultural-rhetorical approach to teaching TPC and how we might negotiate team contracts in PWIs. Firmly situated within the social justice turn, Herman draws from both feminist disability theory and critical race theory to …

“When Two Elephants Fight, It’S The Ground That Suffers ”: A Neo- Marxist Rhetorical Deconstruction Of The United States’ Rhetoric Of Power In Resistance To United Nations Treaties, Divine Narkotey Aboagye

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I present a Gramscian rhetorical reading of American antagonism to the International Criminal Court, a crucial agency of the UN. I probed the rhetoric of power in resistance concerning the discourse of international treaties by showing how both the United States and the United Nations have become global hegemons. From the foregoing, I uncover American resistance to the constitutive force of United Nations treaties by paying attention to post-Cold War American presidents. By using a neo-Marxist lens and analyzing a key foreign policy accord – the International Criminal Court – that spans the presidencies of Clinton, Bush, …

Rhetorical Roundhouse Kicks: Tae Kwon Do Pumsae Practice And Non-Western Embodied Topoi, Spencer Todd Bennington

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines Tae Kwon Do practitioner manuals as sites for better understanding the way diverse rhetorics can become embodied through technique. This dissertation understands martial arts in a Foucauldian sense as rhetorical institutions which discipline practitioners both physically and ideologically. A theory of “embodied topoi,” a term coined here to describe the process by which cultural commonplaces are incorporated into a material, carnal, or performed identity is presented alongside a review of how athletic or martial bodies have been previously studied. Seven popular Tae Kwon Do technical manuals are analyzed for moments when 1. Commonplaces are described, 2. “Daoist …

“The Speechmaking Of A Girl-Orator”: Reason, Gender, And Authority In Dorothy Hunter’S Free Trade Oratory, Erinn Elizabeth Campbell

Honors Projects

Dorothy M. Hunter (1881-1977) rose to prominence during the 1906 United Kingdom general election as a markedly “girlish” yet widely respected free trade orator. While men on the Edwardian public political platform typically built a reputation for oratorical prowess through theatrical displays of “heroic” masculinity, Hunter established her authority as a speaker through two very different (and apparently contradictory) strategies. Her performance of “charming” middle-class femininity helped demonstrate her right to speak on free trade as a “women’s question,” extending women’s traditional authority over matters of domestic consumption to include questions of political economy. Trusting in the power of education …

Civil Procedure As A Critical Discussion, Susan Provenzano, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and …

Fighting For 504: Negotiating Hegemonic Ability Through Verbal Advocacy And Disabled Embodiment, Drew Finney

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In my thesis, I look at San Francisco’s 504 sit-in for disability rights. I argue that both the verbal advocacy and the embodied actions of protestors demonstrate that dis/ability is constructed through a hegemonic process. I contend that combating hegemonic understandings of disability creates a tension between being a counter hegemonic movement and desiring the benefits of hegemonic legibility. To make these arguments, my thesis draws several conclusions. I argue that activists enacted a civil- rights framework to communicate the need for Section 504 to the public. I explain that activists adopted the role of educator to address problematic ideas …

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

Providing Clear Directions And Explanations, Carol Damgen, Carol L. Damgen

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

Giving students an opportunity to do group work in a Public Speaking course allows for an exchange of ideas from various points of view. This activity based on Persuasive Speech can further the students understanding of the assignment in a safe collective.

Working as a team develops strong foundations from which to build a powerful argument based not only on value but factual claims. The outcome of this group activity encourages the steps of building a problem/solution organizational pattern presentation.

The hope of this assessment is to scaffold into a solo presentation building from what the learner has employed from …

Purposefully Forgetting: Surveying San Diego’S Founding Narrative During The City’S Bicentennial Celebrations Of 1969, Noah Pallmeyer

Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

The city of San Diego owes much its success and prosperity to the “victories associated with colonization.” This quote comes directly from the current National Park Service description of the San Diego Presidio. This project turns to the 1969 bicentennial celebrations of San Diego’s founding. This was a rhetorically powerful period in San Diego’s historical remembrance. This project argues that native and other marginalized populations were not properly considered in the narrative of San Diego’s founding during these celebrations. To understand why and how these populations failed to be properly considered, this project turns to the narratives of colonial monuments …

Friendship In The Digital Age: Implications From A Philosophy Of Communication Approach, Tiffany Petricini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Friendship is a central relationship-style that grounds us. Much of the literature on the effects of technology on our relationships, especially friendship, has taken a skeptical approach. The notion of friendship is historically-situated, thus, it requires attention in each era and has prompted questions throughout human history. Our time is no exception. Changing cultures and redefinitions of basic human institutions have led us to our current moment, in which we are experiencing a loud and continuing debate on the effect of technology on our lives. Advancements in science have allowed us to understand our past and present in new ways. …

Apparatgeist And Mobile Communication: Considering Interpersonal Communication Practices, Lisa Enright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile communication is embedded into our daily life increasing our connection to social networks. The development of mobile communication occurred during the second half of the twentieth century and has become domesticated into everyday life. One consequence of the widespread adoption of mobile communication device use is an increase in connectivity. This increase in connection has led to a shift in interpersonal relationships. People now must be aware of when to connect and disconnect to develop meaningful relationships in private, public, and social realms. This project seeks an understanding of how the consequence of increased connectivity and the development of …

Reconciling With Slavery In The United States: An Evolving Narrative, Jamie Phlegar

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This project addresses two strands of inquiry that spring from this issue of evolving race relations in the U.S. First, I examine how Americans talk about the history of slavery in the U.S. What rhetorical strategies are employed when slavery is discussed and/or debated in public history contexts and beyond? Second, I examine talk about the future of race relations in the context of the legacy of slavery. Specifically, I am interested in exploring what rhetorical strategies are employed when discussing the potential for reparations in mainstream arenas.

Thomas Kent's Paralogic Rhetoric As A Framework For Analyzing Corporate Social Responsibility Discourse, Donald E. Penner

English Department Theses

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship increasingly uses rhetorical theory as a method for analyzing contested meaning between communicants. However, the classical and social constructivist rhetorical theories typically used for analysis do not address the primary cause of contested meaning – relativism. Conversely, such theories often contribute to a dualistic worldview by utilizing internally imagined conceptual schemes for analyzing texts. This thesis proposes Thomas Kent’s paralogic rhetorical theory as an alternative method of analyzing CSR texts, and focuses on three common areas typically utilized in rhetorical analyses of CSR texts: text reception, the rhetorical situation, and genre. Where paradigmatic rhetorical theories …

Adolescent Spiritual Formation: Practical Theology As A Filter For Youth Ministry, Jeremy Smith

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

There seems to be a disconnect between the practice and scholars of youth ministry. Historically, the practice of youth ministry has been overly concerned with method, creating multiple approaches, each with its own inherent shortcomings. Responding to this overemphasis on method, scholars of youth ministry have argued for a more theological framework, assuming that the problem lies within a lack of theological education among youth ministry practitioners. In 2001 youth ministry scholarship made a case to place the field of youth ministry under the discipline of practical theology in hopes of grounding the practice of youth ministry in theology. Over …