Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Hands On: An Exploration Of Techne Via Everyday Embodied Practices, Molly Mcconnell

Dissertations - ALL

In the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS), techne has been a longstanding focus of the field, notably as it pertains to our understanding and practice of rhetoric and how we teach writing and rhetorical practices. Some scholars have focused on techne as it is taught in the writing classroom; others have focused on how rhetoric is understood and applied in the classics. My research builds on previous work by considering techne in connection to embodied practices. I argue that discussions of techne have thus far focused on individual learning, especially in relation to composition and rhetoric. In …

Policies Of Pain: Neoliberal Rhetorics Of The Opioid Epidemic In Culture And Policy, Gina Arlene Stinnett

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation outlines and examines the Neoliberal rhetorics of choice and responsibility, and how these rhetorics are utilized in policy and culture related to the Opioid Epidemic in the United States. Through this examination of neoliberal rhetorics in policy and culture, I unpack the circular influence these two have on each other—i.e., cultural assumptions inform policy decisions, and established policy can slowly influence cultural assumptions. The key area in which these two influence each other is through rhetoric, therefore I argue that in addition to an economic and cultural structure, neoliberalism is a rhetorical structure—it shapes our society specifically through …

When The Walls Talk Back: Black Women's Experience In The Graduate Classroom, Benesemon Simmons

Dissertations - ALL

Black women have historically experienced barriers in education and the traditional classroom space, facing visible and invisible walls that reinforce their silence, delegitimization, and harm. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine Black women’s experiences in the graduate classroom and use their voices to challenge the purpose and power of dominant structures—and talk back (hooks, 2014). Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory were used as theoretical frameworks to better understand the unique experiences of Black women graduate students, help highlight their voices, and place their experiences and ideas at the center of analysis. To investigate this topic, …

Beyond The Head And The Hand: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Material Ethos In The Craftsman (1901-1905) And Make: (2005-2010) Magazines., Jason Markins

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation rhetorically analyzes appeals to material ethos in The Craftsman and Make: magazines in order to identify two historical considerations of craftwork and craftsperson identities. I argue that these case studies represent two approaches towards craft at historical moments when automation and industrialization were disrupting what it meant to be a craftsperson or maker. While ethos has traditionally been thought of as a rhetorical relationship among rhetors and audiences, within these magazines ethos is treated as a relationship between craftspeople and nonhuman materials. Drawing upon posthuman and new materialist feminist theorists, I consider how writing and rhetoric scholars might …

Better Writers: Our Relationship To Graduate Student Writers In Rhetoric, Composition, And Writing Studies, Zakery R. Muñoz

Dissertations - ALL

My dissertation studies graduate students and how we teach them disciplinary writing conventions. Following the work of rhetorical genre theorists such as Catherine F. Schryer and Caroline R. Miller, I question how our mainstay academic genres in graduate school influence writing habits and the extent to which they are incommensurate with disciplinary genre expectations and the workload of faculty. I believe studying graduate students as writers is an ironically underexamined area of research in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS)—a field committed to undergraduate writing. The data in this dissertation comes from a large national study that I distributed to …

Disabling Structures: Disability And Graduate Student Professionalization, Gabriella Wilson-Kopko

Dissertations - ALL

While scholarship on graduate education and graduate teacher assistant training has emerged as a growing trend in the field of rhetoric and composition, perspectives from disabled graduate students about their navigation of academic spaces remain understudied and undervalued (Lutkewitte, Kitchens, Scanlon; Macaulay; Badenhorst, Amell, Burford; Brown). An often neglected and precarious student population, disabled graduate students’ experiences are critical to graduate education scholarship because their lived experiences offer insight into critiques of normative and disabling academic structures. This IRB-approved study contributes to scholarship on graduate education by carefully analyzing the cultural expectations of normativity, ability, and productivity that are implicitly …

Curricular Reconciliation: Equitable, Inclusive, And Accessible Approaches To Professional Writing Through Coalition-Led Technical Communication, Lerie M. Gabriel

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines the process of revising a core professional writing course to integrate anti-ableist and anti-racist pedagogies throughout its design. Focusing on the pragmatic and theoretical aspects of this collaborative curriculum redesign, this dissertation examines how an intersectional, Black feminist approach to professional and technical communication curricula disrupts neoliberal legacies. In addition to limiting students’ critical thinking skills, interdependence, and imagination of workplace ethos, these legacies affect instructors' experience of teaching professional and technical writing (PTW), particularly those individuals who hold (multiply) marginalized identities. Through archival research and interviews, this dissertation contextualizes these revisions by exploring the rhetorical history …

Pulling Up The Tangled Roots Of Rural Nostalgia: A Rhetorical Study Of Story And Space, Nature And Nation, Emily Pifer

Dissertations - ALL

Drawing from queer and feminist methodologies, Pulling Up the Tangled Roots of Rural Nostalgia engages rhetorical analysis of popular culture texts, specifically the film The Power of the Dog (2021) and television shows Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020) and Reservation Dogs (2021- ), and material spaces, specifically Yellowstone National Park, to develop a framework for tracing how particular constructions of rural nostalgia (such as “the small town,” “the frontier,” “the cowboy,” “the Indian Other,” “the wilderness”) circulate back and forth across widely consumed digital texts, collective imaginaries, political structures, and material spaces. As my dissertation pulls up and examines the tangled roots …

Evil We Desire: Akrasia And The Ethics Of Conspiracy Rhetoric, Andrew Ridgeway

Dissertations - ALL

My dissertation reimagines the work of four prominent rhetorical theorists—Aristotle, Plato, Augustine of Hippo, and Kenneth Burke—through the lens of psychoanalysis to develop a theory of rhetorical ethics that accounts for the subject’s relationship to libidinal satisfaction, or jouissance. In each chapter, I will examine a useful example of conspiracist rhetoric, which will double as both a case study and a point of departure for a Lacanian reimaging of a prominent rhetorical theory or concept. In the first chapter, I examine the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy and the January 6th insurrection to argue that Aristotle’s description of akrasia, or moral …

“We Are Men”: Constituting The Prisoners’ Rights Movement Through Prison Writing, Emily Kathryn Iknayan

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I investigate how the discourse of incarcerated writers responds to the Attica Prison Uprising across time and geography in prison newspapers and poetry. I first argue that the rhetorical responses of incarcerated writers in the first six months after the uprising construct Attica as an Event, a moment characterized by intense difference where everything becomes possible. A scrutiny of the Event requires dwelling in the moment before clear meanings have been solidified, so conceptualizing Attica as an Event in the writings that are temporally and geographically close to Attica requires speculation. By the time the first-year anniversary …

We Are Performing Against Ourselves: The Relationship Between Respectability And Relatability, Asajahnique Collins

Theses - ALL

This thesis investigates the influence of digital platforms on Black women’s everyday performance of self. It places social media within a broader context in which Black women negotiate their embodied relationship to a wide variety of influences including but not limited to the church, popular culture, mass media, and Black feminist theories and cultures. In what follows, I provide a reflexive critique of the TikTok genre known as Black Girl Luxury (BGL) and explore audience responses to the content within this genre. Black Girl Luxury is a carefully manufactured aesthetic and appearance that is made to have the illusion of …

Indigenous Artistic Activism And The (Re)Envisioned Landscape: Decolonizing Settler Land Knowledge, Hannah Lorell Sparks

Theses - ALL

In this thesis I investigate mimetic Indigenous artwork as a productive site of settler colonial disruption. More specifically, I attend to the potential of these artworks to disorient romantic habits of viewing landscapes. Framed as a critique of settler logics, I argue that the underlying ideologies of Euro-American romantic landscape art have tracked from the 19th-century to today to produce an illusory, aestheticized view of nature as grand and empty, distancing settlers from the material realities of land use and the violence of settler colonialism. In a contributory attempt to decolonize settler understandings of and relations to land, I look …

A Research Center At The End Of The World A Study Of Local Writing Practices In A Global Context, Ana María Cortés Lagos

Dissertations - ALL

How do transnational flows and collaborations shape scientific research writing? What role do local language practices play in a global science context? Or how do phenomena of globalization and internationalization impact the work of scientists writing for local audiences and “with a local eye”? Through a case study drawing on memory, archival material, and interviews, this dissertation explores the language practices of a team of vaccine researchers working from a country in the global semi-periphery (Chile). Drawing on elements of mobility, activity and genre theories, this study traces the work of these scientists across space and time and shows how …

Fighting The Gravity: Settler Colonial Interventions In Land Based Memory, Ezekiel Shawn Choffel

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation establishes a settler-colonial ontological frame work through the melding of Western storytelling genre conventions with Indigenous storytelling methods. Through a series of interconnected non-fiction stories, this framework demonstrates how to directly engage with a settler-colonial subject position by building a method of constellation of personal experience in order to understand options beyond capitalism and settler-colonial complacency. This method is then applied to two geographic locations, the Standing Rock Reservation and Flint, MI. The author shares connections and builds stories through connections with the landscape and specific timeframes (the Water Protectors movement at Standing Rock and the Flint Water …

The Process Becomes Part Of You: A Methodology For Analyzing Institutional Mediation And Programmatic Possibilities In Community Writing, Chad Seader

Dissertations - ALL

To guide antiracist curriculum reform in higher education and better support college writers from racially marginalized and traditionally underserved backgrounds, this dissertation emerged from a five-year ethnographic study of a slam and spoken-word poetry program housed in a DEI office at a large research university. Merging feminist ethnographic methods and sociolinguistic scalar theory, this study develops a methodology for analyzing how institutional influence affects how people engage with writing programs in curricular, co-curricular, and community contexts alike—even in spaces outside of formal institutional structures. The study finds that student writers use slam and spoken-word poetry to bridge the embodied knowledge …

Future Climate Rhetorics Of Belize: A Counter-Apocalyptic Inquiry Into Belize’S Possible, Probable, And Preferable Futures, André Habet

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation investigates future climate rhetorics of Belize through a variety of methods in order to mediate the various conceptions of the future professed in climate policy, experiential phenomenology, and acoustic ecologies of agroecology. Chapter one considers the values embedded in climate change policy documents, specifically the Nation Communications documents composed by Belize’s various ministries since the country signed to the Paris Agreement in 2016. Using the People’s Agreement of Cochamba as an alternative lens, the chapter explores how people-centered, as opposed to market-centered, attunements informing climate policy can potentially lead to a more just, equitable future that does not …

Assembly Line Americans: Labor, Language, And Literacy At Ford Motors, Vincent Portillo

Dissertations - ALL

Assembly Line Americans: Labor, Language, and Literacy at Ford Motors explores the significance of Henry Ford’s and Ford Motor’s industrial education project, which impacted the working-class life and educational development of migrants and US citizens alike. Ford’s industrial education project emerged in its Highland Park, Michigan plant where Ford produced Model T’s and in 1914 founded the Ford English School (FES). The FES engaged an Americanization curriculum as a way of preparing a largely migrant workforce for labor on the assembly line and to apply for US citizenship in the name of developing an industrial class of labor. I begin …

Receiving A Queen: A Queer And Trans Feminist Classical Reception Rhetorical Historiography Of Elagabalus, Thomas William Passwater

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies representations of Elagabalus, the sovereign of Rome who ruled between 218–222ce, after her assassination to examine how depictions and historical accounts of Elagabalus's life make rhetorical decisions about Elagabalus's identity and being that can foreground the composer's relationship to history and the function of history as a rhetorical force. Thus, this project, through studying Elagabalus's composers, raises questions about the nature of figure studies and history. The project draws on trans, queer, and feminist theories and rhetorics which help highlight the contingent and conflicting nature of Elagabalus's identities across representations without settling them into a singular narrative …

An Overheated Debate: The Influence Of Premillennial Apocalyptic Rhetoric On Climate Reform Discourse In The United States, David Charles Gall-Maynard

Dissertations - ALL

Despite decades of scientific research and increased civil and governmental calls for reform, the United States continues to spiral toward climate catastrophe. Apocalyptic rhetoric helps us understand how even the most pressing environmental and societal threats are perceived differently according to audiences' rhetorical and ideological frameworks. Drawing on the work of Barry Brummett and Kenneth Burke, I argue that the premillennial sub-genre of apocalyptic rhetoric constitutes a rhetorical frame through which many secular climate reformers and evangelical Christians make sense of the environmental and societal impacts of climate change. In chapters that analyze secular and Christian climate reform discourse and …

Not Appropriate For Children: A Look At The Composition Practices And Rhetorical Strategies Of Single Moms In Academia, Alexandria Margethe Hanson

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores how single mothers in higher education across geographic locations, academic ranks, disciplines, and identities build support systems and draw on rhetorical strategies derived from their embodied knowledge to survive and navigate in academia. Single mother experiences are underrepresented in scholarship about parenting in higher education. This absence is evidenced in policies, systems, and structures that prioritize the needs of heteronormative family units. The lived experiences and material realities of single mothers reveal how their lives outside academia shape and are shaped by their lives within it, including scholarly activity, interactions with colleagues, and relationships with their children. …

Antichrist In The Oval Office: The Rhetoric Of ‘Antichrist’ In Online Discourse Surrounding Donald Trump, Meagan Bojarski

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how people compare the president to the Antichrist online, specifically during the Trump administration. Looking at digital Antichrist comparisons as distinct communicative practices, I argue that the digital affordances and logics that allow for the rapid spread of ideas online work synergistically with the historical weight of the Antichrist as a concept, helping the comparisons to spread further and faster than they could have through other mediums while simultaneously being more impactful than other digitally-spread content due to the wealth of sources, both within religion and pop culture, which can be drawn on. In examining a Twitter …

Imaginative Rhetorical Invention In The 21st Century: An Analysis Of Afrofuturism And Black Utopian Thought In A Black Lady Sketch Show As An Avenue Toward Black Liberation, Natalie Weathers

Theses - ALL

Inspired by recent events following the deaths of unarmed Black bodies killed at the hands of police officers and white vigilante citizens (Griffith, 2020; Oppel, 2020; BBC, 2020) this thesis seeks to validate the seemingly impossible aspirations of Black struggle and liberation in attempt to dismantle white supremacist ideology and oppression. Grounded in rhetorical theory emphasizing the imagination and canon of invention alongside critical perspectives of Afrofuturism and Black utopian thought, this thesis demonstrates the liberatory power of the Black American imagination within the United States in the 21st century through an analysis of A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019).

Noise Over Signal: Phonography Culture As Participatory, Patrick Williams, Jason Luther

Librarian Publications

While participatory culture has been of special interest to scholars for nearly three decades, much of the focus has centered on digitally networked contexts. The digital age has indeed transformed our approaches to listening to music and how we operate as fans of music; these approaches can weave together the new and the old, and are enacted among a variety of spaces, objects, and relationships. We explore how the re-emergence of one such object in the digital age — the LP — has produced social arrangements that perhaps excavate older listening practices but do so in ways that have been …

Biblical Rhetoric Of Separatism And Universalism And Its Intolerant Consequences, James Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

The long history of the Jewish and Christian use of separatist rhetoric and universal ideals reveals their negative consequences. The Hebrew Bible’s rhetoric about Israel as a people separated from the Egyptians and Canaanites is connected to Israel’s purity practices in Leviticus 18 and 20. Later communities wielding greater political power, however, employed this same anti-Canaanite pollution rhetoric in their efforts to colonize many different parts of the world. Separatist rhetoric was used to protect small Jewish communities in the early Second Temple period. The Christian New Testament rejected many of these purity practices in order to makes its mission …

Designing For Human-Machine Collaboration: Smart Hearing Aids As Wearable Technologies, Krista Kennedy

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer’s rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company’s promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions …

Exploring "Gezi Ruhu" Activism: Seriality And The Rhetorical Study Of 21st Century Protest, Avi Luce

Dissertations - ALL

Abstract Exploring "Gezi ruhu" Activism: Seriality and the Rhetorical Study of 21st Century Protest is an examination of three case studies using contemporary uptakes of seriality—a social arrangement that specifically considers passive relationships engendered by the physical environment—and rhetorical theory as combined analytic lenses. Examples of 21-century protest, specifically Gezi Protests in Istanbul, Turkey, “Free CeCe” activism in Minneapolis, Minnesota and “Faces of Pride” in Syracuse, New York point to collective arrangements as vital components to understanding activism, particularly how individuals come to and engage in collective protest rhetorically. Seriality additionally can guide methodological practices that foreground activists’ experience and …

On Archival Work In Digital Communication And Becoming Archival Ourselves, Krista A. Kennedy

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

Text of plenary talk given at Theorizing Communication in a Digitally Networked Age, Penn State Communication Arts and Sciences Summer Symposium, 14 June 2017, The Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center, University Park, PA.

Fashion, Communication, And Consumerism, Jodi Robbins

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The fashion industry is a 1.2 trillion dollar global market, with more than 250 billion dollars spent each year in the United States alone. With over 4 million individuals employed in the United States it takes a village to distribute, sell, and communicate apparel across the world. A large portion of the fashion industry functions with the help of sales associates. Businesses would not be able to function without design, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, advertising, communication, buying, planning, and consulting. In a global market where communication, social media, and image are quickly changing, the retail environment is promoting functionality of fashion …

The Communication Of Cheating: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Communication Major League Baseball Players Use When Accused Of Taking Performance Enhancing Drugs., Andrew Mallon

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

There has always been a strong bond between baseball and controversy. Most recently, this connection has manifested itself in the form of the steroid era in baseball. While that chapter in baseball history has closed, there are lingering effects. Each season, players are receiving suspensions for performance enhancing drug (PED) use by Major League Baseball.

Through different methods of rhetorical analysis, four players will be looked at and critiqued on their statements regarding PED accusations. Reading and analyzing the communication through the lens of these players shapes the strategies that each player chose to implement. In a post-steroid era league, …

Priestly Lineages In History And Rhetoric, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

A comparison of Cross’s reconstruction of the Oniad high priestly line with his Mushite theory lays the basis for re-evaluating historical scholarships’ interest in ancient Jewish priestly families. In the religious politics of the Second Temple period, the Aaronide priestly dynasties were the Mushite priesthood. Differentiating priestly families earlier in Israel’s history raises questions about methodology and purpose as well as evidence.