Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

“Do You Think This Is Not Happening?”: Rhetorical Laundering And The Federal Hearings Over Planned Parenthood, Calvin R. Coker

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay offers a rhetorical reading of Congressional hearings investigating the Center for Medical Progress’s (CMP’s) videos falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue. Despite the suspect nature of the allegation at the time it was levied, and subsequent investigations rejecting the CMP’s claims, the notion that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue has persisted alongside accelerated antiabortion jurisprudence and vitriolic rhetoric. This acceleration and persistence may be the result of what I term “rhetorical laundering” wherein suspect evidence is justified as worthy of study in a credible public forum, only to have its treatment in …

Processes: Writing Across Academic Careers, Christoper Iverson, Dan Ehrenfeld

Milne Open Textbooks

Processes: Writing Across Academic Careers is an edited collection showcasing the diversity of writing processes, styles, and formats in academia. Students, faculty, and staff share both published and unpublished work and reflect on their writing process as well as writing in their fields and disciplines. This book shows that, while writing looks and functions differently in different disciplines, college communities center on writing.

The text’s sections feature compositions from nursing, STEM and health sciences, education, and history and culture. The examples include reflections on the role of writing in one’s academic career, examples of professional writing in the sciences, research …

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study Of Cortez, Florida, Karla Ariel Maddox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Resilience” has often been defined by examining case studies in resilience failures. In contrast, this case study utilizes the oldest, still functional fishing village in Cortez, Florida to rhetorically analyze how organizational communicative practices have worked to ensure its resilience. Situating this conversation within Rhetoric proves valuable since so many attempts to define and utilize “resilience” seek to capitalize on its positive connotation but distort resilience definitions and practice. This dissertation explores three research questions: 1. “What systems and/or structures made our continued existence possible and what ideologies or goals drove their creation?” 2. “What ideologies, perceptions, and/or goals inspired …

Trigger Warnings And A Pedagogy Of Trust, Morgan Read-Davidson

English Faculty Articles and Research

"As the director of both the creative writing and rhetoric and composition programs at Chapman University, a mid-sized private university serving 150+ majors as well as 1000+ general education students, it has now become a common and expected occurrence to have both students and contingent faculty come to my office expressing anxiety over course content. While the larger conversation about difficult content and trigger warnings is not new, the sudden need for urgently scheduled meetings with me did not begin until the COVID-19 Pandemic and our move to remote instruction. This seems to coincide with the increase of online and …

Embracing A Pedagogy Of Intentionality: Reassessing Online Writing Instruction Principles Through A Post-2020 Lens, Autumn Bishard

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic upended every system, routine, set of practices and policies that stood as status quo when the pandemic was declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. At that time, many writing instructors across America had to quickly become online writing instructors without any specialized training. Taking stock of what was learned during the pandemic, this thesis examines the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) and makes recommendations that enhance inclusivity and accessibility. CCCC OWI Principles 1, 2, and 11 are examined by utilizing …

Of Mētis And Cuttlefish: Employing Collective Mētis As A Theoretical Framework For Marginalized Communities, Justiss Wilder Burry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This LGBTQ+ rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) community-based research explores the ways community members and queer community participants communicate about potential intimate partner selection in Central Florida. The dissertation introduces the theoretical framework of “collective mētis” as a way to analyze and discuss community communication against Florida’s required HIV disclosure laws that attempt to medicalize this and control this community’s intimate partner selection. Research questions include: 1) How do people in counterpublic enclaves (Chávez, 2011) communicate their potential intimate partner desires to others in the community including the types of disclosures they express and negotiate, and how? 2) How …

What On Earth Are We Doing (?): A Field-Wide Exploration Of Design Courses In Tpc, Jessica L. Griffith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores design related courses within the field of Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) to uncover programmatic trends in undergraduate courses at a field wide level. This applied study uses a mixed methods approach to understand the following questions: what do the range of design courses look like in the field of TPC, how are these courses taught, and what would an effective design course look like? To answer these questions, this study uses a mix of three types of data: (1) institutional data on courses, (2) interviews with faculty and administrators who have taught (or are currently teaching) …

Running On Empty: Blanks And Voids In Academic Publishing, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

No abstract provided.

Constructing A Theological Framework That Revitalizes The Missional Nature Of Churches Of Christ In South Australia, Mark Daniel Riessen

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the need for a theological framework that revitalizes the missional nature of Churches of Christ in South Australia. The problem identified within this ministry context was a lack of clear theological principles that informed a common understanding of identity for missional engagement. The purpose of the project was to create a study guide that informs common theological commitments and grounds congregations for missional vitality. A research and development team made up of seven Church of Christ ministers from different backgrounds was assembled to design a curriculum that addressed the problem. Through eight two-hour sessions over four months …

“To Discipline My Writing Process”: How Newcomers To Open Textbook Development Moderate Affective States And Sustain Momentum While Writing, Dawn Atkinson, Stacey Corbitt

Writing

Despite the burgeoning presence of open textbooks in higher education and their influences on courses, learners, and teachers, few studies have tracked their production as it unfolds, and none have addressed authors’ affective states and associated actions during open textbook construction. Open textbooks are freely available for use, and the length of the textbook genre and pressure to craft quality content may trigger emotional responses from authors during their creation, but without detailed accounts of open coursebook development from which to draw guidance, writers may resort to trial and error to sustain progress during their projects. To address the research …

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …

Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest …

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Comentarios Críticos Escritos Por Estudiantes De Medicina Sobre La Evaluación Del Paciente, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

La presente investigación analiza los comentarios críticos producidos por estudiantes chilenos de 3º y 4º de Medicina en la sección Comentario/Reflexión final de la Ficha Clínica con el objetivo de conocer su opinión sobre la experiencia de su estancia hospitalaria y la práctica médica en general, así como de entender los elementos retórico-discursivos que utilizan para posicionar su voz en el texto al evaluar dicha experiencia. Para investigar este fenómeno se realizó un análisis textual computarizado de las categorías gramaticales y los contenidos semántico-funcionales valorativos desde un enfoque cualitativo inductivo-deductivo. Los resultados del estudio mostraron un predominio de los comentarios …

Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …

Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Syllabus For Writing For The Social Sciences, Brenna E. Crowe

Open Educational Resources

A writing class designed for students pursuing degrees in the social sciences—the major assignments are a "career builder" where student practice rhetoric with professional writing on job searches, a literature review, a public awareness campaign, an informational interview, and a portfolio.

Engl 200: Writing About Writing (The Problem Of The University), Flora De Tournay

Open Educational Resources

"The Problem of the University" is a (largely) open education syllabus that marries a criticality of/with the university as a site and space of knowledge making and knowledge suppression with a metacognitive writing approach for undergraduate students. The syllabus' contents include texts from bell hooks, Paolo Freire, Derrida, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, among others.

Complete and updated syllabus available at https://waboutw.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Marketing Brands, Juggling Jargon, And Countering Space: Six Fitness Enthusiasts’ Engagement With Exercisers Within Instagram’S Fitness Community, Sydney Elizabeth Denham

Theses and Dissertations

As of December 11, 2022, 791k users had utilized the hashtag #FitnessInfluencer on their Instagram content. A fitness influencer is a user on Instagram who has a large follower count and posts fitness-related content to their platforms. In all aspects, the fitness influencer is an enthusiast who contributes to the digital fitness community. This research examines the role that the fitness enthusiast plays within this community on Instagram. Carmen Kynard’s definition of literacy as something that we do rather than have inspired much of my thinking throughout this project. Also, Diana Bossio’s research on journalists greatly informed my methodology for …

Las 188 Sample Im#2, Patti Verstrat

LAS 188 and 189 Materials

This is an instructional handout is an example of an inquiry-based writing project for LAS 188, Introduction to Liberal Arts, at Parkland College.

Las 188 Sample Im#1, Patti Verstrat

LAS 188 and 189 Materials

This is an instructional handout is an example of an inquiry-based writing project for LAS 188, Introduction to Liberal Arts, at Parkland College.

The "Othering" Of America: How The Strategic Use Of Crisis And Ressentiment Succeeded In The Trump Era, Laura J. Franklin

Dissertations

The establishment of a crisis theme through public rhetoric often triggers widespread attention, resulting in public concern and media coverage of an issue that could potentially be overblown or deceptive. In right-wing political discourse, this crisis warning is typically delivered by a White male leader with ready access to the powerful news media. An “us versus them” theme often occurs. Within this mode of a hegemonic exclusion, a culture of immigrants or an American minority are often depicted, perhaps aggressively, as a threat: A threat used to motivate, enrage and create the frustrations inherent in ressentiment. This dissertation explores the …

The Great Unknown: Unlimited Artificial Intelligence (2023-2024), Kathryn O'Brien

Argument

O’Brien begins this argument essay with the following reminder that “We use A.I. every day without even realizing. There are so many different algorithms built into every single app we use, as well as search engines like Google.” She goes on to consider the use of Artificial Intelligence in algorithms, online information availability, healthcare, and the arts. Throughout the use of examples within these various contexts, O’Brien interrogates the need for limits to AI in order to counter bias, limit the prevalence of hate speech, and ultimately preserve our humanity.

Just Trust Me (2023-2024), Gabrielle Wall

Argument

The argument essay, “Just Trust Me,” covers a range of sources, motives, and technologies involved in the spread of disinformation. From Google search results to AI generated content and deep fakes, Wall ultimately argues for regulation of AI and intervention from government organizations rather than banning information. Her argument focuses on the consequences, such as voting or health decisions that can stem from unregulated practices of disinformation.