Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

A Woman’S Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, And Early Modern Rhetorics Of Science, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Accounts of the rhetorical tradition in early modern England often focus on the Royal Society of London and the scientific epistemologies and visual pedagogies surrounding technologies like the microscope. One critic of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish, theorized her own optics to counter the increasing exclusivity of the scientific community. An analysis of this woman’s optics reveals how the rhetorical concept of mimesis brought a theory of embodied, material sight to a historical moment in which objectivity was emerging. This critically imaginative analysis thus brings forth an early rhetorics of science in which alternative epistemologies may critique mechanical, experimental processes …

Empirical Drawings: Utilizing Comic Essays In The Social Studies Classroom To Teach Citizenship, Angelo Letizia

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article posits that the comic medium, wedded with traditional essay assignments, may be a powerful tool for social studies teachers, those who prepare social studies teachers at the collegiate level and other teachers and professors who desire to teach about citizenship in an era of "fake news" and alternative facts.

Queer Rhetorical Agency In Fort Lauderdale Tourist Lgbtq+ Advertisements, Jordan I. Guido

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

The following case study focuses on the implicit and explicit rhetorical messages in LGBTQ+ focused travel advertisements following Waitt and Markwell’s (2014) observations of LGBTQ+ advertisements increasingly gaining prominence within the mainstream promotional material. The case study investigates the queer messaging within Fort Lauderdale’s national 2015-2017 Hello Sunny Campaign; heralded for its groundbreaking LGBTQ+ and Trans representation. The scholarship that informs this study are at the intersections of composition and rhetoric, queer composition, and queer tourism studies. The methodology for the case study includes a rhetorical analysis incorporating a new materialistic lens. The two promotional images were analyzed for their …

Gendered Rhetoric Of Video Game Streaming : Female Agency, Harassment And Cat Girls, Tommie Ann Sutton

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The streaming community is large and varied, with the most popular streamers playing video games daily for audiences of tens of thousands of people. The community is well known for its exclusion and harassment of female players and streamers, despite demographic information showing that most player populations represent an even spread amongst men and women. This study analyzes two case studies in female streamer agency: the first is an IRL streamer named Pokimane and the second on the female animated streamers called VTubers. Specifically, it shows how Pokimane disrupts gendered harassment and how VTubers ignore harassment and perpetuate stereotypes that …

The Co-Requisite Collaboration: Building Self-Confidence, Self-Efficacy, And Rapport Through Dialogue Journals In A Basic Writing Course, Timothy Jacob Pyatt

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Research on dialogue journals has grown in the last fifty years, but a gap exists in understanding how and why these dialogue journals work. During the fall of 2020, I conducted a study utilizing quantitative data to examine how dialogue journals impact student’s self-confidence, self-efficacy, and rapport. The data has confirmed that dialogue journals are effective classroom tools and that various aspects such as word count and purpose can be impacted in connection to student’s perceptions of themselves. This project responds to the gap in the literature and provides data to support how and why dialogue journals promote growth in …

Approaching Trans Debates As Fascistic Sites Of Engagement., Sarah Jump

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past decade, trans rights issues have been a legal topic of discussion and are still discussed publicly in 2021. This thesis researched how arguments surrounding anti-trans issues were successful in the United States. The arguments surrounding these issues are important to study to see how they pass within society and if traditional rules of argumentation are changing. This thesis proposes that traditional dialectical argument is no longer occurring and has taken a post-dialectical turn. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the kinds of arguments used in these issues and build the case that they are evidence …

The Space Between: Listening Within Difference In Writing Center Consultations., Jessica S. B. Newman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing center consultations are built of writer and consultant relationships and differences. Listening is a stance that facilitates navigation of these differences, yet it has long been undervalued. I investigated the roles of listening in writing center consultations, exploring the perspectives of writer and consultant participants. For this mixed methods case study, I collected observations, surveys, interviews, and asynchronous responses to follow-up questions. I also synthesized three listening theories that attend to relations between self and other: dialogic listening, rhetorical listening, and listening otherwise. Listening’s connections with openness, understanding, and power have many implications for the writing center. Listening involves …

Getting Our Act(Ivism) Together: Understanding And Fostering Secondary And University Teacher Advocacy Collaborations, Nicole E. Green

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Given the deleterious effects on students and teachers caused by ever-expanding neoliberal approaches to K-16 English Language Arts and literacy education policy, this dissertation argues effective policy advocacy and reform absolutely depends on collaborations among secondary ELA and postsecondary composition and English education teacher-scholars. Borrowing from the traditions of participant action research, this project traces the experiences of a small group of secondary and postsecondary English educators across the span of a 16-month collaborative advocacy project. By examining a range of data including recordings of group meetings, interviews, and written reflections through the lens of activity theory, this study seeks …

Rotten With Prediction, Serena Raquel Hicks

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project focuses on the relationship between religion and technology as it is portrayed in Science Fiction (SF). This thesis explores the SF genre rhetorically by examining the 2002 movie Minority Report (MR), which signaled the importance of surveillance and the need to predict future crimes following 9/11. The events of 9/11 played a significant role in post 9/11 SF films, which reflect and critique our communal and cultural values. 9/11 created a new relationship between the U.S justice system, predictive technologies (PTs), and data gathering. Through the Bush Doctrine of “preemptive action,” the U.S government attempted to use Dataism, …

Breaking Down The Gendered Barriers In Critical Pedagogy, Tonianne Erickson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Critical pedagogy is a teaching philosophy that guides students to question dominant discourses and the status quo, encouraging them to reflect on the part they play in these discourses. Since critical pedagogy deals with critical consciousness and sociopolitical topics, teachers who engage in this teaching philosophy are expected to exert some power in the classroom in order for students to get to that place of critical consciousness or personal growth. However, when female-identifying teachers use their power to embody critical pedagogy in the classroom, they are often met with resistance from students and fellow colleagues, rendering them unable to effectively …

Iluqata: All Of Us, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The field of technical and professional communication (TPC) is solidly within the social justice turn that encourages TPC practitioners and scholars to consider how their work, if left unchecked, could perpetuate oppressive societal norms, such as racism. Increasing awareness of how technical communicators can combat oppression through coalitional action and through centering multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) voices and experiences through inclusive research methodologies are important components towards equity in TPC. This dissertation presents five accepted publications that demonstrate how narrative methodologies and coalitional work function to enhance scholarly activism and work towards equity. These five publications are thoroughly introduced …

Literacy, Rhetoric, Tradition, And Truth In The Age Of Bede, Gerard A. Lavin Iii

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite his own high level of literacy and education, the Venerable Bede (672/3–735) inhabited a world in which nearly all personal, social, educational, and political discourse was conducted orally. A thorough understanding of his works will require an understanding of this discourse, but attempts to apply broad theories of “orality” derived from other cultures to early medieval England have repeatedly foundered. This dissertation establishes a set of guiding principles to produce a more nuanced and localized model of discourse in Bede’s England and observes a variety of ways oral and literate forms of rhetoric were employed by political actors in …

A Field-Wide Examination Of Cross-Listed Courses In Technical Professional Communication, Carolyn M. Gubala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study assesses cross-listed courses (courses with a mix of undergraduate and graduate students) to uncover current pedagogical and programmatic trends at a field-wide level. The applied mixed-methods study provides important foundational insights into an under researched area in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC). Research questions include: What courses are cross-listed? How does offering these courses affect writing programs and writing program administration? Through the use of three types of data: (1) course data from institutional documents, (2) interview data from program administrators and/or faculty, and (3) pedagogical materials (syllabi and assignment sheets) from the courses supplied by administrators or …

Distribución De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En Los Apartados Del Trabajo Fin De Máster Escrito En Español Y En Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This study correlates with a research study published in the journal Pragmalingüística, in which the contrastive use of the rhetorical functions of citations in master’s theses in Spanish and English was studied. The main objective pursued by this new research is to determine which rhetorical functions are used most frequently in the different parts of a master’s thesis and what these can accomplish in each part of the text. Following Petrić (2007), a computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citation was used to study this phenomenon in a corpus of sixteen (16) theses of which eight (8) were …

Countering Online Misinformation In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Samantha Sparrow Williams

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis encourages the intentional and explicit integration of the best practices in media literacy education within the first-year composition classroom. The nature of FYC, which incorporates such content as research skills and source evaluation, provides an ideal opportunity to address the online misinformation and disinformation that have resulted in growing political polarization and cynicism. Recent findings suggest that these trends can be countered with the teaching of practices like lateral reading to verify a source’s veracity. After first demonstrating the challenges that university freshmen may bring with them to campus, this project makes suggestions for simple, consistent practices that …

The Matter And (Mostly) Manner Of Mere Christianity, Gary L. Tandy

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Presented to a meeting of the Inkling Folk Fellowship (IFF), July 23rd, 2021.

Zoom Session Link: https://youtu.be/F2ZKEPD0YFg

Research Question•Why does Lewis’s work of popular apologetics continue to find a wide readership while other excellent books in the same genre—e.g., Sayers’s Creed or Chaos—do not?

Christianity Today Survey (2000): Most influential Christian books

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1942-44; 1952) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (1932-67) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1968) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908) Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) Richard Foster, …

Core Advanced Writing: Rhetoric Of Storytelling, Cruz Medina

English

On September 23, 2020, the New York Post reported that “President Trump had signed an executive order expanding a ban on government agencies receiving sensitivity training involving critical race theory to federal contractors” (Moore). By the time this executive order passed, I had already planned to teach a course titled “Rhetoric of Storytelling” that included a Critical Race Theory (CRT) reading from Aja Martinez advocating for counterstory. In response to the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests during the summer of 2020, my academic department, like many institutions nationwide, issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. In …

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 …

Cold Mother, Cold Case: Memoirs Of An Abandoned Daughter, Tasha Marie Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

“Cold Mother, Cold Case: Memoirs of an Abandoned Daughter,” is a collection of stories that many young girls and women can relate to. These are stories of solitude, abandonment, abuse, resentment, determination, and survival. These emotions stemmed from the relationship with the one person that is supposed to love unconditionally, our mothers. The main purpose for the author writing the memoir was to use it as a way to heal from and to reflect on her childhood. The author’s hope is that the story will inspire young girls and women to strive for greatness from life, even when dealt an …

Designing Life: A Socio-Cultural Analysis Of Ikea Kitchen Planner And Ux, Yunye Yu

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The design process of a kitchen, like design tasks in other areas, requires specific domain knowledge and skills. However, kitchen design has its unique requirements and constraints due to the limited flexibility in appliance selection and work layout. While planning and designing a kitchen, users face complicated situations where they need to consider many technical factors such as the structure and floor plan of the house, lighting and heating system, interfering traffic in the kitchen, geographic locations of the house, temperature and humidity, and clean technology to name a few. The kitchen is also highly sensitive to local culture. For …

Making Culture Relevant In Technical Translation With Dynamic Equivalence: The Case Of Bilingual Instructions, Massimo Verzella

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

One of the central tenets of technical communication research and pedagogy is user-analysis (Redish, 2010; Barnum & Redish, 2011). Technical documents conceived to be used by individuals from different backgrounds should be the product of cycles of negotiations between authors and audiences. Similarly, the idea of participatory design (Ehn, 1993; Courage & Baxter, 2005; Simonsen & Robertson, 2012) revolves around a rhetoric of collaboration and shared-authoring that involves users at all stages of product or content development. User-centered and user-participatory approaches emphasize the importance of user feedback to identify not only problems, but also possibilities that writers and designers might …

What Can Asian Eyelids Teach Us About User Experience Design? A Culturally Reflexive Framework For Ux/I Design, Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The proliferation of web applications in recent years has brought about conversations among technology designers about user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design’s role in propagating and reaffirming cultural bias, and in facilitating race-based discrimination. At times, such conversations have demonstrated how taking stock of racialized and cultural bias during the design process can challenge widely held design assumptions. For example, in 2015, Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, was reported to have facilitated racial profiling when users began posting to the application’s Crime and Safety section reports of “suspicious” persons on the basis of racialized appearance, as opposed to …

Testing In Translation: Conducting Usability Studies With Transnational Users, Emma J. Rose, Robert Racadio

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

What do we mean by usability in everyday life? For us, everyday life implies the series of choices and decisions that happen each day as people are trying to get things done. These things are often taken for granted, they might seem mundane, they may be overlooked. Usability inhabits everyday life in the documents used by a Vietnamese mother of two young children, having recently moved to the United States, and navigating the healthcare system in a new country for the first time. Usability shows up again as a Chinese couple considers whether or not to move out of their …

Designing For Everyday Life In Global Contexts, Guiseppe Getto, Huatong Sun

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

This special issue is a situated response in this discourse context, to investigate research issues surrounding the mundaneness and messiness of “Designing for Everyday Life in Global Contexts.” For the past two decades, a steadily growing body of work on the intersections of intercultural communication and information design has been developing within the field of Technical and Professional Communication (e.g., Kostelnick,1995; Chu, 1999; Fukuoka, 1999; Honold, 1999; Thatcher, 1999; Zahed, Van Pelt, & Song, 2001; St. Amant, 2002, 2005; Sun, 2006, 2012; Agboka, 2013; Breuch, 2015; Gustav, 2015; St. Amant & Rice, 2015; Maher & Getto, 2016; Sun & Getto, …

Digitally Mapping The Buddhist Holy Land: Intercultural Communication, Religious History, And Networked Rhetoric, Derek F. Maher, Guiseppe Getto

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Intercultural communication presents an array of well-known and much-discussed challenges, including the difficulties of engaging in productive dialogues regarding cultural assumptions, the problems of translation, tensions between macro-level value systems and the uniqueness of individual cultures, and challenges to developing communication technologies that are culturally appropriate (Kostelnick, 1995; Maylath, 1997; Thatcher, 2006; Sun, 2012). When addressing the diverse dimensions of religious culture, there is the added obstacle that understanding another’s religion can sometimes become entwined with how people feel about their own deeply held religious values and assumptions (Jackson, 2004). Special obstacles to understanding can arise in relation to religion …

Beyond Biography: Using Technical And Professional Documentation To Historically Contextualize Women’S Agency, Emily January Petersen

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

1908, Harriet Barraclough—Relief Society president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS; a.k.a. “Mormon”) Halifax Ward, Leeds, England—taught the women in her religious community to be “lifters and not leaners” (Halifax Ward, Folder 1, p. 58). This communication, documented in a handwritten minute book, falls within various definitions of technical and professional communication (TPC), as the practice of TPC “creates both knowledge and value [which]...comprehends the good of the community in which the practice has a history” (Miller, 1989, p. 69). TPC occurs within communities, and “forges connections between new and existing knowledge” (Durack, 1998, p. 181). …

The Death List Of Sandarmokh: Mayme Sevander's Work As Emancipatory International And Intercultural Professional Communication, Kyle Mattson

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Professional communicators work on international and intercultural projects in dynamic assemblages. Recent scholarship has defined assemblages as powerful institutional, cultural, and material configurations that affect life and work in diverse situational contexts or geographies. For example, Stephen J. Collier (2006) described global assemblages as "actual configurations through which global forms of techno-science, economic rationalism, and other expert systems gain significance" (p. 400). Likewise, about the instrumentalist logic behind such systems, Dale L. Sullivan (1990) asked us to critique "the technological mindset" and allow critical action to inform technical and professional communication practice (pp. 375-377). In international and intercultural professional communication …

Religion And The Professional Ethos: The Ymca, Dale Carnegie, And The “Business Man”, Lance Cummings

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Despite predictions of religion’s demise in the first decade of this century (Krattenmaker 2010; Meacham 2009), religion and spirituality have come front and center in many public arenas like pop culture, health and well-being, and politics. Whether it be the power of the religious right and left in politics, anxiety over Islamic terrorism, or simply the use of meditation within large corporations, religious issues play an important role in how we view and participate in secular society. This is no less true in the world of business and professional communication. Considering the role religion has played in rhetorical thought and …

World Religions And Professional Communication: Theories And Practices Of The Discipline, David Alan Sapp, Carroll Ferguson Nardone, Barry Thatcher

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Scholarly conversations about the influence of religion on professional communication have largely been absent in our discipline’s published literature, yet religion often intersects with the work of teachers, researchers, and practitioners. It intersects with rhetorical patterns at many levels and contexts, including the organizations in which we work and volunteer, the sites where we conduct research and solve problems, and our teaching/training practices with students, clients, co-workers, community partners, and the many other populations we regularly serve in our professional lives. To explore the intersections of religion, globalization, and professional communication, this special edition of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization …

Understanding International And Domestic Student Expectations Of Peers, Faculty, And University: Implications For Professional Communication Pedagogy, Linda R. Macdonald, Binod Sundararajan

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Increasing populations of international students are entering Canadian universities, and instructors of Professional Communication must rapidly adapt to a changing student population. At the studied Maritime Canadian university, numbers of international students increased by 300% between 2009 and 2013. These numbers necessitate a review of our pedagogical approach to ensure student learning, success, and satisfaction in Professional Communication classrooms. Student expectations are linked to their satisfaction and, therefore, retention. We know little about the expectations incoming international students have of the university, their Canadian peers, and their instructors. We also know little about the reciprocal expectations held by domestic students …