Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Rewriting The Graduate Experience: A Study Of The Writing Experiences Of University Of Texas At El Paso Graduate Students Across Disciplines, Jennifer L. Wilhite

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Graduate writing can manifest as a barrier to successful and timely degree completion as writing is the primary modality in which graduate programs use to evaluate depth of learning and quality of knowledge created. Native language status, inexperience with advanced academic genres, time away from the academy, and socialization struggles are factors that can aggravate writing challenges. The purpose of this qualitative study is to better understand the graduate writing experiences of twelve women returning to the academy. The study asks if writing manifests as a barrier to completing their graduate programs, ascertains what kinds of graduate-level writing supports they …

Writing Inside And Outside The Rhetoric Of Containment: An Analysis Of Writing Strategies In First Semester Students Transitioning To The First Year College Composition Classroom, Brenda R. Gallardo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Based on Bowden’s (1993) notion of containment, this study analyzes how containment—as well as other pedagogical restrictions and limitations—was manifested in the high-school-to-college transition of first year student writers. This study addresses the following questions of inquiry: How do participants’ experiences in high school affect them as writers in college?; What practices and strategies do students in the first year composition classroom apply to overcome containment in the college writing classroom?; and, How can instructors use pedagogy to overcome containment? This dissertation applies a qualitative design to gather data via interviews, questionnaires, and classroom observations. Via grounded theory, data gathered …

The Rhetorical Mediator: Understanding Agency In Indigenous Translation And Interpretation Through Indigenous Approaches To Ux, Nora Karina Rivera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In 2018, I became involved in a collaborative community-based project to co-organize an event with the purpose of collecting resources to help in the professionalization efforts of Indigenous translators and interpreters. Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial theories, this interdisciplinary study examines the work done during this event through a user experience (UX) research lens that analyzes the various ways in which Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) can better support Indigenous language practices. The colonization of the Americas brought a layer of issues that continue to affect the way in which Indigenous communities conduct their …

Motivation And The Young Writer: Reimagining John Dewey's Theory Of Experience, Billy Cryer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Issues of motivation remain a perennial topic among teachers of English Language Arts and first-year college composition courses. While modern evidence-based research in educational psychology has yielded fruitful avenues for harnessing motivation in writing instruction, in recent decades, industrious composition scholars have also turned to history for insights on composition pedagogy. In this study, I also embark on a historical excavation to glean from our composition forebears regarding motivation in writing instruction. In particular, I examine how the educational writings of John Dewey were translated into the English classroom during the Progressive Era. More specifically, I seek to recover how …

The Role Of Translation In Multilingual User Experience, Tetyana Zhyvotovska

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Examining the intersections of technical communication, user experience, and translation, this study focused on the contexts of a user experience (UX) research center as a site where these intersections occurred and on practices of multilingual users while encountering translated information. In order to explore translation practices in relation to UX and cover the gap in understanding multilingual UX, the study examined how multilingual users worked with translated content, how they acted and reacted to it, and what they experienced during this process. Based on the existing scholarship in translation and usability studies in technical communication, this Dissertation undertook empirical research …

Understanding The Digital Lives Of Transnational Students: A Case Study, Chowaing Chagra Belekeh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The proliferation and the fast-paced evolution of digital information communication technologies (ICTs) in contemporary times have arguably raised concern for us to comprehend what we do with these technologies and what these technologies do for us. The experience of engaging these technologies may not necessarily be the same for everyone—especially students who come from around the world to attain post-graduate degrees in the United States. This research focused on understanding the digital lives, choices, and experiences of transnational students who navigate and negotiate geopolitical borders and boundaries (physical)– in their quest for education. Using a case study analysis and collecting …

Graduate School Application Accessibility For International Students, Estefania Castillo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The graduate school application is a time consuming, yet important, process that can often be complicated for students. However, this process is made even more complicated for international students who often face extra steps and other obstacles when applying to graduate programs in the US. Following my own experience of applying to a master's program as an international student, I set out to further explore how international students experienced and navigated this process. This research project explored the graduate school application process through the experiences of international students that were shared in testimonios through platicas, or open and friendly conversations. …

Virtual Agency: A Hermeneutic Examination Of The Network And Actors Within The Composition Classroom, Ronald Dean Straight

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation explores the visible and invisible rhetorical choices made in, around, and through the composition classroom and its community of practice, students, faculty, technologies, staff, and other undiscovered actors, through Actor Network Theory and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The discoveries will better situate the impact of identities and actancy within composed, hybrid worlds. Students, society, the world is now collectively connected and able to communicate, acquire knowledge, and interact on a virtual world stage. The exigence for this dissertation's exploration is that Moore, et al. (2016) concluded that students did not make a connection between the technology they have access …

Ingo Websites, Image Circulation, And Visual Representations Of Development In African Countries: Exploring Local Perceptions, Ruby Pappoe

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project critically examines the visual and digital representations of African countries on Savethechildren.org, Oxfam.org, Mamahope.org, and Waterislife.com, using Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and focus group interviews. Grounded in interdisciplinary conversations within rhetoric and composition, intercultural technical communication, postcolonial studies, and development studies, this project reveals how inequalities of the past continue to exist in both visual and digital forms on international NGO websites. It shows that although these organizations seek to promote development and social change in low- and middle-income communities in Africa, the online content they use not only engender but keep in constant …

Towards A New Cholx Consciousness: The Visual Rhetorics Of Cholx Artistas As A Method For Social Justice Movements, Elvira Carrizal-Dukes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation study examines the Cholx subculture through the artwork of Chola artistas Paola Rascón and Vicko Alvarez Vega. Growing up, I interacted easily with Cholos and Cholas, but I also knew that in society there was an overall negative idea of Cholos and Cholas. My research advances Cholx consciousness as a method for social movements through the examination of the visual and written rhetorics by Chola artistas. For my dissertation study, I have drawn on theoretical frameworks from Chicana Feminism, Latino Critical Theory, and Social Justice Rhetorics as discussed by Dolores Delgado Bernal, Kendall Leon, Tara Yosso, Daniel Solórzano, …

An Autoethnography Of A Non-Traditional Student Veteran A Journey Of Transition To The Present, Ruben Paquian

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is a lack of research on career military student veterans in higher education. I use a layered-account autoethnographic approach (Adams et al., 2011) to recount my experience as a career military student veteran. Having spent 30-years in uniform, I felt that my perspectives could help both student veterans and career military student veterans traverse through the world of higher education while providing staff and faculty a better understanding of how career military veterans see the world. In general, veterans have difficulty trying to keep their military identity separate from their student identity. Military identities are more engrained in veterans …

The Negative Impact Of Copy-Pasting Within Memoranda: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Army's Sharp Program Memoranda, Lionell Manlutac

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research used the framework of the coding system of grounded theory to analyze the United States Army's Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) Program memoranda. A rhetorical analysis framework was used to point out the need to incorporate social justice into technical communication. The analysis of the copy-pasted information shows that the author lacks an authorial voice and writing to a general audience, which creates a lack of exigency in creating a safe and healthy work environment.

The Rhetoric Of Low Carbon Energy Technology Scientists And Engineers, Nicolas Cesar Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Scholars in the burgeoning field of Energy Communication have successfully contributed to communication studies and environmental communication practice. However, energy communication scholars have largely focused on energy of media coverage, corporate communication and decision making in the context crisis. While rich and informative, this tendency has left quotidian aspects of energy communication rather understudied. As such, this Thesis contributes to the understanding of the internal, non-untechnical rhetoric of low carbon energy technology (LCET) scientists and engineers (herein LCET professionals). Textual analysis was used to examine LCET professionals' internal rhetoric at professional trade conferences and through long form, semi-structured interviews. Wind …

Unveiling Veiled Voices: Understanding The Experiences Of Muslim Women Who Wear The Hijab In Public Spaces, Mohammed Sakip Iddrisu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In view of the invisibility of Arab(ic)-Islamic rhetorics and the dominance of scholarship on Christian rhetorical traditions in rhetorical studies alongside an increased visibility of public rhetorics about Islamic women in American politics, this research explores the experiences and performances of veiled Muslim women in public spaces. While much of rhetorical scholarship on public spheres focuses on public talk or the circulation of public texts, in this study, I, together with six veiled Muslim women in El Paso, Texas, explore how veiled Muslim women navigate the hijab's visibility as a marker of difference with strangers-simultaneously performing and provoking performative public …

The Representation And Shaping Of The Hispanic Identity And The Assignment Of Power In Three Types Of Hsi-Related Discourse: Hea Amendments, Utep President Diana Natalicio Convocation Speeches, Academic Articles, Julie Ann Rivera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation examines the impact of Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) related written discourse on the representation and shaping of the Hispanic identity and the assignment of power. Performing a critical discourse analysis of three types of written HSI-related discourse: amendments to the Higher Education Act (HEA), academic articles, and UTEP President Diana Natalicio convocation speeches, I look below the surface of the discourse to draw out implications for Hispanic students and HSIs. My analysis merges Norman Fairclough's method of Critical Discourse Analysis, known for its focus on the relationship between language and society, with Lloyd Bitzer's The Rhetorical Situation, which will …

Community College Writing Program Administrators: Implementing Change Through Advocacy, Lizbett Tinoco

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation, Community College WPAs: Implementing Change Through Advocacy, examines the work and role of Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) at community colleges. Defining the role and the work of WPAs is very complex, and even more so at community colleges since these institutions are very diverse places in regards to programmatic structure and student population. The scholarship of writing program administration has typically excluded community colleges; as a result, my research focuses on including these narratives. Unlike a lot of WPA narratives that often describe WPAs as "composition wives" (Schuster, 1991; Hesse, 1999) who do much of the dirty work …

A Mexican American's Passage: An Autoethnographic Exploration Of Identity And Self-Empowerment, Corina Lerma

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis presents a critical autoethnography that explores how an understanding of political and cultural events have contributed to my conflicted sense of identity. The purpose of the study was to identify genealogical and historical patterns that manifest in the traumas that have influenced and problematized the construction of my reality and to discover if personal traumas and conflicted senses of identity as a Mexican American in the United States finds any source in the social and political events that took place during the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s. The autoethnography was conducted both through research of Mexican American history, …

Technological Literacy Across Disciplines: Examining Graduate Instructors' Experiences, Sidouane Patcha Lum

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation critically examines graduate instructors’ technological literacy across disciplines in a four-year university, in order to explore avenues through which their challenges teaching with classroom technologies can be met. It also investigates the possibility that non- resident instructors and resident instructors’ difference in cultural orientations (patterns, norms and ways of doing) influence instructors’ ability to use technology for their specific functions. For this purpose, Multi (modal) literacy theories and the TPACK framework (technological, pedagogical and content, knowledge) are used as theoretical underpinnings which foster a better understanding of instructors’ technological literacy, while grounded theory developed by Glaser and Strauss …

Literacies Of The Disaster Zone: New Media Genres And Participatory Rhetorics After The 2010 Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill, R. J. Lambert

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

On April 20, 2010, explosions at the British Petroleum (BP) Macondo Project in the Gulf of Mexico initiated what would become the world's largest accidental release of oil into the ocean. This ecological disaster, a unique combination of natural and human causes, is one of many significant traumas over approximately the last two decades that various stakeholders have documented, participated in, and responded to largely through the expanding and increasingly ubiquitous media of the internet, computers, cell phones, and other networked communicative technologies, which both enable and constrain the variety of responses to traumatic events.

This Dissertation improves our understanding …

Spatial Genres Of Revitalization: Desiring-Machines And The Production Of Public Subjects, Larry S. Morgan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project, Spatial Genres of Revitalization: Desiring-Machines and the Production of Public Subjects, is guided by the need to understand how the recent changes in El Paso's gentrifying downtown are impacting the development of public subjectivities. This Thesis is concerned with how the formation of public subjectivities is occasioned by changes in a city undergoing "revitalization" in terms of how people move through urban space. At the same time it is also concerned with how the people moving these spaces imagine and configure it to different ends which surpass the intention and violence of gentrification.

To this end, Spatial Genres …

Re/Framing The Hispanic/Latino Nonprofit Identity, Jasmine Villa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The focus of my Dissertation is to examine how an organizational identity is constructed rhetorically by three Hispanic/Latino based non-profit organization. By looking at how a non-profit organization's online presence contributes to the transformation of the organization as a public, we are able to see rhetoric as a discursive and material practice taking place.

Rethinking Multimodality In First-Year Composition: Applying Theories Of Digital Rhetoric, Procedural Rhetoric, And Electracy To Multimodal Assignments, Jennifer Falcon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

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When The First Language You Use Is Not English.Pdf, Patti Wojahn, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Kate Mangelsdorf, Mais Al-Khateeb, Karen Tellez-Trujillo, Laurie Churchill, Cathilia Flores

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Language Difference And Translingual Enactments, Kate Mangelsdorf

Selected Works Temporary Series

This is a response chapter that appears in _Crossing Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs_, eds. Bruce Horner and Laura Tetreault. Logan: Utah St. UP, 2017, pp. 199-205. This book won the 2016-17 Mina P. Shaughnessy Book Award from the Modern Languages Association (MLA).

When The First Language You Use Is Not English.Pdf, Patti Wojahn, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Kate Mangelsdorf, Mais Al-Khateeb, Karen Tellez-Trujillo, Laurie Churchill, Cathilia Flores

Departmental Papers (English)

No abstract provided.

Perceptions On Collaborative Writing: Exploring Student And Instructor Perceptions Of Collaborative Writing Practices In Professional Communication, Levi Ray Martin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research study focuses on the perceptions of collaborative writing held by undergraduate students enrolled in professional writing course at The University of Texas at El Paso. Working with current scholarship surrounding effective collaborative writing practices as well as Achievement Goal Theory (AGT), the author observed two different courses of professional writing. Three types of data were collected: 1. survey responses from participants at the beginning-of and end-of the course; 2. interviews with participants at the end of the semester; and 3. classroom observations. The range of data collected provided similar and different perceptions held by the student participants. The …

Seeds Of Neocolonialism In Development Discourse: A Study Of Neoliberal "Megarhetorics" Of Global Development And Ecofeminist Resistance, Moushumi Biswas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper is based on a case study of www.monsanto.com, the official website of biotech company Monsanto, and transnational voices of resistance as exemplified by eco-critical activist Vandana Shiva. My rhetorical inquiry concerns the future of the global farming sector and allows for an interdisciplinary exploration of transnational development discourse through the overlapping but complementary lenses of ecofeminism and critical discourse analysis (CDA). The purpose of my study – spanning rhetoric, composition, critical theory, cultural theory, communication studies, business ethics, and postcolonial studies – is to trace new notions of discourse creation in the 21 st century using a combination …

The White Rose Movement: The Rhetorical Situation And Rhetorical Stances Surrounding The Six Anti-Nazi/Anti-War Leaflets, Veronica Ruth Cruz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study focuses on the White Rose Movement's six anti-war/anti-Nazi leaflets the Movement produced and distributed between June 1942 and February 22, 1943 in Munich, Germany. The persuasiveness of the non-violent resistance Movement was analyzed and discussed using a Bitzerean and Booth rhetorical analysis. Though numerous active and passive social protests, such as marches, music, and rallies, have been examined rhetorically in the past, the research surrounding the written form of protest is minor. In direct regards to the White Rose Movement, specifically, the Movement has yet to be examined through a rhetorical lens until now. The Movement and its …

New Black Boxes: Technologically Mediated Intercultural Rhetorical Encounters On The U.S.-Mexico Border, Beau Scott Pihlaja

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Activity theory (AT) and actor-network theory (ANT) as theoretical frameworks begin their analysis of the world with the concept of "actors" engaged in activity towards some objective and with other actors in the human and non-human world. In this project, I use AT and ANT to analyze the mediating effect of communication technologies in intercultural rhetorical contexts, in this case a binational small business, and address two questions: 1.) How do common communication technologies (email, phone, IM chat, texting applications) define and transform intercultural rhetorical encounters? And 2.) How do individuals rhetorically engage perceived cultural others using common communication technologies …

The Rhetoric Of Mental Health: An Examination Of The Recategorization Of Autism Spectrum Disorder In The Dsm-5 And Its Absorption Into Public Discourse, Elsa Martin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation explores the discourse of mental health across genres and public spaces. The research of this project is situated within the overlap of the fields of Disability Studies (Brewer, Selfe, Yergeau, 2014; Brueggeman and Kleege, 2003; Kerschbaum, 2012; Lewiecki-Wilson, 2003) and Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (Keränen, 2013; Kopelson, 2009; Segal, 1994; Scott, Segal, & Keränen, 2013), a space that focuses on the rhetoric of mental health (Chrisman, 2008; Emmons, 2008; Hacking, 2009). Following the principles of these fields, this project deconstructs the recategorization of autism in the DSM-5, the media coverage it received, and the public reception of …