Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Subscribe, Follow, Save: Podcast Preservation In The Platform Era, Ben Pettis, Jeremy Morris

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Podcasting has produced a glut of cultural content. Collecting and saving these sounds for future study, however, remains challenging. This article asks: “How are recent developments in the platformization of podcasting threatening the ability of users and researchers to save, study, and sustain podcasts and the cultural insights they offer?” To answer, we focus on a podcast preservation project, PodcastRE.org, and discuss strategies for creating an (un)stable repository for future studies of podcasting. While new developments challenge preservation efforts, they also offer archivists opportunities to prioritize the cultural significance of podcasts, rather than the economic motives of the podcast industry …

The Two Lives Of Chuck Norris, Ben Pettis

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

“Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups. He simply pushes the world down.”

“Chuck Norris counted to infinity – twice.”

“Chuck Norris once strangled someone – with a cordless phone”

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Chuck Norris, the 1980s action star, became a tongue-in-cheek model of toughness and masculinity in viral internet memes known as “Chuck Norris Facts.”

Cultural Roots Of Eating: A Comparative Analysis Of Organic Discourse And Marketing Practices In China And The United States, Zubin (Jane) Guo

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how cultural frameworks influence the development of the organic food market and shape individual attitudes towards the label “organic” in the U.S. and China. While the popularity of organic food has increased in recent years, cognitive and behavioral reactions toward the label “organic” have differed across societies. In the U.S., healthy eating discourse aligns closely with the individualistic culture and atomistic cognitive style, highlighting the importance of salient elements such as specific nutrients or chemical use. In contrast, Chinese healthy eating discourse is based on balance and harmony, which is directly related to traditional Chinese culture of …

Book Review: Move Slowly And Build Bridges: Mastodon, The Fediverse, And The Struggle For Democratic Social Media, Ben Pettis

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Put simply, today’s landscape of social media is a bit of a mess. A swath of recent scholarship has rightly tracked major shifts in social media, including the rise of walled gardens, enshittification (Doctorow, 2023), numerous privacy concerns (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Marwick, 2023), and the general rise of what Shoshana Zuboff (2020) has termed ‘surveillance capitalism’. Though social media has undoubtedly brought many benefits, it is increasingly difficult to overlook its negative underbelly. Given this context, Robert Gehl’s recent book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges makes a timely contribution to studies of new media …

Cultural Roots Of Eating: A Comparative Analysis Of Organic Discourse And Marketing Practices In China And The United States, Zubing (Jane) Guo

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how cultural frameworks influence the development of the organic food market and shape individual attitudes towards the label “organic” in the U.S. and China. While the popularity of organic food has increased in recent years, cognitive and behavioral reactions toward the label “organic” have differed across societies. In the U.S., healthy eating discourse aligns closely with the individualistic culture and atomistic cognitive style, highlighting the importance of salient elements such as specific nutrients or chemical use. In contrast, Chinese healthy eating discourse is based on balance and harmony, which is directly related to traditional Chinese culture of …

The Resonance Of Resonance: The State Of Movement, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This article explores a state of movement in the humanities into nonhuman entanglements. A key term, “resonance,” emerges in this movement. Predominating scholarship orients resonance as a flourishing. In this article, accounts of the destructiveness of mechanical resonance signal a telling lacuna in humanities scholarship, one this article works to remove.

Writing Centers & The Dark Warehouse University: Generative Ai, Three Human Advantages, Joe Essid

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

Institutions are scrambling, at an unaccustomed pace, to adapt to generative artificial intelligence. While justified concerns focus on plagiarism, the nature of student learning, and changes to assignments, recent scholarship has largely ignored the potential for faculty and staff unemployment that may accompany acceptance and deployment of the new technology. As we ponder seismic changes in higher education, one voice should join, indeed lead, campus discussions. Writing center professionals have proven adept at weathering technological changes, budget cuts, administrative big ideas, and professional marginalization for more than half a century. Early on, centers were sometimes dismissed as mere “fix-it shops” …

Equity Achieved: What Cannot Be Said, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot …

Fala: Through The Lens Of Zarefsky’S Fourth Distinction, Oliver Vettoretti

Arts & Sciences Student Symposium

Attention to public image is an ongoing responsibility for a President in a free society, by virtue of the fact that public opinion and favorability influence voting inclinations. Power influences, legislatively and symbolically, and the way it is wielded defines each President. Fala served as a figurative sponge that absorbed criticism against Roosevelt and wiped it away. Although public opinion regarding Roosevelt’s politics was often very divided, Fala provided a positive distraction that shifted the public’s focus away from Roosevelt’s disability and served as a humanizing figure for adults and children alike to adore.

A Rhetorical History Of Black Studies: Black Power & Epistemology, Kayla Corbin

Honors Theses

In this thesis, using my own experiences and research, I will map out a rhetorical history of Black studies and its relationship with the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s. Using Foucault’s method of genealogy, I will highlight the distinct epistemological assumptions that inform Black studies as a discipline by looking at the material conditions and moment in which the discipline was created. In order to do this, my thesis will interrogate three interrelated discourses of Black studies at the university level: first, the larger history of student activism and its relation to Black studies; second, my own approach …

Troping For Justice And Joy: A Feminist Rhetorical Study Of Women’S Reproductive Health, Claire E. Noppenberger

Honors Theses

Taking my cues from feminist rhetorical studies, and the enactment of the personal as political, my thick description of women’s reproductive healthcare is focused on my own encounters with these rhetorics through a collection of my experiences through various media. This description adopts an autoethnographic attitude to approach these rhetorics “as pluralistic, subjective, personal, and potentially inclusive,” by using my own position and narrative to frame this rhetorical study. Just as feminist rhetorical studies require meta-reflexive awareness, autoethnography requires the acceptance of “responsibility for our subjective lenses through reflexivity.” My thick description uses the metadata of these media, including the …

To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, …

Václav Havel At The End Of The Cold War: The Invention Of Post-Communist Transition In The Address To U.S. Congress, February 21, 1990, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

A mere three months after the peaceful Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and less than a year after his last imprisonment under the communist regime, playwright-turned-president Václav Havel stood before a joint session of U.S. Congress in February of 1990. In his address, Havel marked, for his American audience, the new freedoms being established at home. More than just a victory lap, however, Havel’s visit articulated the importance of the invention of post-communism, as the end of the Cold War had to be constructed for his global audience. Havel’s version of invention in the speech used temporality and embodiment as key …

To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as 1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; 2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, …

[Introduction To] Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth And Memory In The Twenty-First Century, Nicole Maurantonio

Bookshelf

Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming “Heritage Not Hate.” Theirs, they said, was an “open and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage.” How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did “not hate” square with a “heritage” grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound …

[Introduction To] Yesternight: A Story For Those Whose Days Cannot Contain All Their Dreams, Linda B. Hobgood

Bookshelf

Recent release Yesternight from Covenant Books author Linda Hobgood is a fascinating story designed to celebrate the potential of imagination, to treasure childhood dreams and remember them for a lifetime.

With this compelling book, the author seeks to persuade readers of all ages that even morning cannot quell our dreams so long as we keep recalling with joy each “yesternight.”

Over, Under And Around: Spanish Heritage Speakers' Production (And Avoidance) Of Subjunctive Mood, David Giancaspro

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The present study explores the subjunctive mood production of 29 heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish (17 advanced proficiency and 12 intermediate proficiency) and 14 Spanish-dominant controls (SDCs). All participants completed a Contextualized Elicited Production Task (CEPT), which tested their oral production of both lexically-selected (intensional) and contextually-selected (polarity) mood morphology in Spanish. Between-group analyses of the CEPT reveal that the HSs diverge significantly from the SDCs in subjunctive production, specifically by underproducing, overproducing, and avoiding subjunctive mood morphology. Despite these differences, however, the HSs still exhibited sensitivity to mood, producing significantly more subjunctive mood in expected subjunctive contexts than in …

The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments And New Ways To Argue, Jordana Cox, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In response to the latest "crisis" in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and-especially-argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing "case for the humanities" by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources …

The Sight And Site Of North Korea: Citizen Cartography's Rhetoric Of Resolution In The Satellite Imagery Of Labor Camps, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, satellite mapping of North Korea, especially of its labor camps, has become important forms of evidence of human rights violations, used by transnational advocacy groups to lobby to Western governments for change. A phenomenon of “citizen cartography” has emerged where non-expert humanitarian actors use commercially available software like Google Earth to “infiltrate” the borders of North Korea. This essay interrogates the politics of seeing that takes place in creating the site and sight of North Korea by citizen cartographers, and historicizes these processes of seeing in Cold War and post-Cold War visual culture. Specifically, citizen cartography of …

Semantics And The Study Of Religion, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This essay argues that the approach to meaning articulated by Donald Davidson supplies all the student of religion needs to know about this subject. By focusing on interpretation as understood by Davidson, we can understand, for example, the beliefs and practices of a people such as the Dogon of Mali. By adding to this the evidence of ethnography and history, students of religion can give a compelling account of change and adjudicate between competing analyses.

American Studies + Computational Humanities, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates "a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research," as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal …

On Network, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

From Homeric to Hellenistic cultures, we are given a robust vocabulary of networking. We have terms for "nets;' for "work;' and for "network:' Each term gives rise to yet another nuance of the role network plays in being human. In this section on lexical network, I present these terms in a catalog form as an homage to archaic Homeric rhetoric. Homer's catalogs are plentiful in the epics, his catalog of ships being particularly well known. Homeric catalogs call attention to their items. Catalogs circulate well and are an aid to remembering the past, as ever-present. The catalog of "network" I …

Reexamining Por And Para In The Spanish Foreign Language Intermediate Classroom: A Usage-Based, Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Elizabeth M. Kissling, Andrea Tyler, Lisa Warren, Lauren Negrete

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The present chapter represents the first stage in the larger investigation; it examines two aspects of applying a usage-based, CL approach to teaching por and para. First, we presented the multiple meanings of the two forms gradually, building learners’ knowledge in a series of scaffolded treatments, throughout the course of an entire semester rather than presenting them all in one concentrated lesson. Second, we presented the multiple meanings of por and para and structured their order of presentation according to a Cognitive Linguistic-inspired analysis, which emphasizes the systematic relationships among the multiple meanings. Such a systematic analysis is consistent …

Criticism On The Map, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

On the evening of November 9, 1989, thousands stormed the entry points of the wall marking the historic split between West Berlin and East Berlin, the archetypal symbol of the bipolar Cold War. Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush sat with Secretary of State James Baker, fielding questions from reporters in the Oval Office. On his desk, a binder of briefing information was opened to a standard State Department map of Cold War Germany. Throughout the hastily arranged press conference, the president often gestured toward the map, even tapping on it to emphasize his points about a "whole and free Europe" …

A More Perfect European Union?: The Transnational Networks Of The European Union’S Embassy Open House In Washington, D.C., Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Annually, the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in Washington, D.C., holds an embassy open house day for its 27 member nations to celebrate European culture and educate tourists on the functions of EU politics and international relations. Amidst an ongoing debt crisis and a continuing exploration of its identity as a supranational entity, “Embassy Day” affords an opportunity to see the EU as a spatial network uneasily caught in the tensions between the often nostalgic nationalism of its constituent countries and the future-oriented technocratic transnationalism of its composite alliance. By analyzing the cultural artifacts of Embassy Day from its …

The Rhetorical Roots Of Communication Centers, Linda B. Hobgood

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter traces the rich rhetorical roots of the creation of the modern communication center, following the lead of Sproule and Farrell as well as the postcard author. Placing this contemporary learning enhancement in the context of that abundant history reminds us that the precepts associated with the discipline of rhetoric and shared in communication center consultations are as classic as they are classical, and the questions deliberated by scholars and practitioners of this ancient art are timeless. The postcard's photo of the venerated Athenian ruins offers both a symbolic and explicit link between the legacy of the paideia of …

Beyond Syntax And Cities At War: Doing Rhetoric's History And Theory Alloiostrophically, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

How does one make contact with difference when doing rhetoric's history and theory? Rather than being afflicted with an anxiety that John Schilb once termed heterophobia, what if doing the history and theory of rhetoric were healthy about heteros? Heteros means "difference" but visually the word shows more than this, namely "eros" in "heteros" - love in difference.

In this chapter, I explore a love of difference in the history and theory of rhetoric. Starting from my own love of Homer that I dare express, I tum to a peculiar text about Homeric rhetoric, …

Introduction: A Revolution In Tropes, Jane S. Sutton, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Our view of tropes is that they are rhetoric's own unique resources, but for ineluctable historiographical reasons have been more or less closed off from the production of theory. Our "trope project" began simply enough. If the workings of tropes could be identified in a new way, then the aim and purpose of rhetoric could be retheorized in terms new to democratic deliberation. Working under the slogan "Yes, tropes-but all of them," we attempted a new classification system based on the Greek roots of hundreds of tropes listed in various old and new sources such as Bernard Dupriez's A Dictionary …

Figuring Out/In Rhetoric: From Antistrophē To Alloiostrophē, Jane S. Sutton, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

We begin with critical reflections on rhetoric as the antistrophē of dialectic. Here is the first line of Aristotle's Rhetoric: "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophos] to dialectic." What this means exactly has been a point of some controversy over centuries of study in the rhetorical tradition. As John Rainolds said, "There are as many interpretations of this little word . . . as there are interpreters." However, we see something other, namely that these "many interpretations" of rhetoric as antistrophē are actually "one." The result is an amplification of the face of rhetoric to look, act, perform, …

[Introduction To] Mapping The Cold War: Cartography And The Framing Of America's International Power, Timothy Barney

Bookshelf

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between North and South, East and West. Maps also influenced how identities were formed in a world both shrunk by advancing technologies and marked by expanding and shifting geopolitical alliances and fissures. Pointing to the necessity of how politics and values were “spatialized” in …