Rhetoric Commons^™

Sustainable Hope: An Analysis Of The Rhetorical Process Of The Forward Through Ferguson Commission Report, Nicole Ramer

Theses

This project focuses on the Forward through Ferguson Report, a commission report written by appointed commissioners after the protests of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. While the first chapter of my thesis focuses on the report itself and commission reports as a genre, the second chapter analyzes the most recent report, the State of Police Reform, from an ecological lens. Throughout the project, I kept returning to the question Susan Wells posed in a recent interview with Composition Forum, revisiting one she first asked in her oft-cited 1996 essay: what do we want from public rhetoric …

Engl 400: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Song, "We Are The World": A Call To Change -- Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow (And A Potential Rhetorical Framework For Covid-19 Relief Efforts), Cammy Toddy

Virtual 2020 Spring Student Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

On the night of January 28, 1985, the charity single song, “We Are The World,” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, was produced in A&M Studios in Los Angeles. At the recording studio, there was a sign that said, “Check your egos at the door,” which acted as a visual reminder for why these artists were there. This idea was put in place by producer Quincy Jones, who knew he had one night to bring over 40 of the country’s biggest stars together for a cause much bigger than themselves. A rhetorical analysis of “We Are The World” reveals …

The Voice Of Honor: Centering An Indigenous Ethic Of Protocol In U.S. Rhetorical Studies, Dakota Sandras

LSU Master's Theses

This project takes seriously the pressing rhetorical questions facing the field of communication studies which illuminate opportunity for radical disciplinary transformation and demand action beyond heightened racial and cultural awareness. In response, I seek to demonstrate that centering Indigenous epistemologies might inform and advance decolonial strategies for change. More specifically, I examine the theory and practice of First Nations customs of protocol and develop what I deem an ethic of protocol consisting of honor, humility, and action. After observing how these core tenets function synergistically in the protocol of elders, rites of passage, and entering another’s land, I argue that …

Rhetoric And International Human Rights: The Case Of The Senegalese Talibés, Christopher Parisella

Senior Honors Projects

CHRISTOPHER PARISELLA

(Political Science, Writing & Rhetoric, French)

Rhetoric and International Human Rights: The Case of the Senegalese Talibés

Sponsor: Lynne Derbyshire (Communication Studies, Honors Program)

While in Senegal, I witnessed the hurdles faced by proponents of international human rights standards. Thousands of Muslim boys, called talibés, undertake their Koranic education in Senegal. Many are forced to beg in the streets by their educators, and abuse in the schools is common. Still, this education is considered a valuable part of the boys’ spiritual development. Despite the multitude of countries that have openly supported and ratified international human rights compacts, many …

Socrates As A Philosophical Exemplar, Aria Mia Loberti

Senior Honors Projects

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates famously denied being a teacher. Nonetheless, others took him to be a teacher, and there is no doubt that his attempts to encourage people to philosophy are pedagogical. So, we are presented with a puzzle—one that is still with interpreters today, despite important work on the issues (e.g., Nehamas 1985, 1992). In this project, I approach these issues from a different angle, asking not whether Socrates is a teacher (or whether philosophy can be taught) but considering Socrates as a philosophical exemplar. I contend that this question will help us to understand not only Socrates but …

Students At A Crossroads: Ta Development Across Pedagogical And Curricular Contexts, Cassandra Ann Book

English Theses & Dissertations

A longstanding question in rhetoric and composition has been how to best educate composition graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs). Although many assume that writing centers are useful spaces for TAs to practice pedagogy and learn about writing processes in preparation for classroom teaching, recent scholarship complicates the claim that transfer from writing centers and/or practicums into composition classrooms is straightforward. Moreover, no study fully considers how the role of the writing center and teaching writing in English MA programs intersects with students’ development as teachers, writers, and scholars. This project brings together several strands of scholarship—the transferability of writing center experience …

Global Language Variation In Online Writing Instructional Spaces: English As A Lingua Franca Among Global Participants In A Massive Open Online Course, Angela May Dadak

English Theses & Dissertations

Two vectors of the internationalization of US higher education—online courses and student diversity—intersect at a point where a broad mix of culturally and linguistically diverse students enroll in online courses, including writing courses. This study applies an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) lens to examine language in an online writing environment in order to understand how the participants use their linguistic resources to communicate in English across varieties and around the world. This study employs discourse analysis to two discussion forums from a US-based composition MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). More than three quarters of the MOOC participants came …

A Rhetorical Frame Analysis Of Palestinian-Led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (Bds) Movement Discourse, Jennifer Megan Hitchcock

English Theses & Dissertations

This rhetorical frame analysis uses a combination of rhetorical theory and frame analysis to examine the rhetorical framing strategies of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. This project investigates how both official and vernacular BDS activist-rhetors frame the movement and their goals, how they frame their responses to evolving rhetorical situations and challenges, how they tailor these frames for different audiences, and how resonant these frames are likely to be for targeted audiences. The results of this study suggest that BDS activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel …

Leveraging Maternal Rhetoric, Space, And Experience: La Leche League's Emergence As A Counterpublic, Jenny Lynn Moore

English Theses & Dissertations

For over six decades, the international, mother-to-mother breastfeeding support organization La Leche League (LLL) has been helping women breastfeed successfully. LLL was formed at a time when the dominant ideology of scientific motherhood framed mothers as obedient adherents to physicians’ strict guidelines, which encouraged bottle-feeding and discouraged close mother-child bonds. LLL has been credited with challenging scientific motherhood, transforming medical discourse and practices surrounding infant feeding, and prompting the medical professional to accept mothers’ active involvement in decision-making; yet, paradoxically, it has also constrained mothers by reducing women to their maternal biology, discouraging mothers from participating in the public sphere, …

Genesis: A False Start, Tate Kollar

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Genesis is the first book of the Bible. As the starting block for humanity and creation, Genesis holds incredible weight. Genesis is the beginning of God’s foundational text for his people. Intuitively, one would expect the content of the narratives in Genesis to reflect this weight. One would expect models for human behavior. One would think it would be the first step on the path to redemption from the Fall in the garden. One would expect God to help his people in creating safe, efficient, supportive, functional communities and families. Contrary to these expectations, a majority of the Genesis narrative …

9/11 Then And Now: How The Performance Of Memorial Rhetoric By Presidents Changes To Construct Heroes, Kristen M. Grafton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study is concerned with American presidential rhetoric at the cross-section of hero rhetoric and memorial address. It analyzes presidential memorialization of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. 9/11 is arguably the most significant tragedy in recent American history. The purpose of this study is to identify the type of hero each president since 9/11 has attempted to construct of himself for the public and discuss the rationale behind that hero construction. To complete this objective, I analyze the second 9/11 memorial speech from the presidencies of Bush, Obama, and Trump for hero construction. A close reading examining the …

Instrumentalization Theory: An Analytical Heuristic For A Heightened Social Awareness Of Machine Learning Algorithms In Social Media, Andrew R. Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

New innovations in information management and communication technologies have produced technological assemblages which have radically altered the way people socialize and interact with the world. The most significant and ubiquitous of these technologies is what is colloquially referred to as ‘machine learning.’ Like most, if not all, technologies, machine learning models are neither wholly good nor bad. Their functional ethics are largely determined by the context in which they are employed. However, their ubiquity demands that we develop a heightened social consciousness of the way machine learning simultaneous constrains, manipulates and democratizes social processes. In order to develop better social …

"The Fiery Furnaces Of Hell": Rhetorical Dynamism In Youngstown, Oh, Joshua M. Rea

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to define the theory of rhetorical dynamism and illustrate how this theory can be applied to studies of rhetoric and place. The study builds on current rhetorical scholarship and adds to it with the four characteristics of rhetorical dynamism: that places are rhetorically invented, that they hold rhetorical tensions, that they are fluid and constantly evolving, and that they are active participants in a reciprocal rhetorical process. Rhetorical dynamism is illustrated in two places, Westlake Terrace and Idora Park, each in Youngstown, OH. By building a rhetorical history of each site, the study shows how each place …

Charles Mckendree Neal Papers, 1933, Charles M. Neal

Center for Restoration Studies Archives, Manuscripts and Personal Papers Finding Aids

Finding aid for the Charles McKendree Neal Papers, 1933.

Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

2020 Mlk Keynote Address: Michelle Alexander Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Michelle Alexander, Rosanne Somerson, Matthew Shenoda

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

2020 MLK Series Keynote Michelle Alexander brings audiences profoundly necessary and meaningful insights on the practice of mass incarceration that plagues the US justice system, as well as eye-opening conversation on how we can end racial caste in America. Lecture Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 5:30pm, RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence, RI.

In her acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander peels back the curtain on systemic racism in the US prison system in a work that the New York Review of Books describes as "striking in the intelligence of her …

Rhetoric And Race - Background And Assignment - Shu Mlk Symposium 2020, Jon Radwan

CHDCM Publications

Provides an overview of Rhetoric and describes the historical development of Race as a rhetorical construct. Offers two associated assignment options: a digital audio interview plus video debrief on contemporary racism, and/or an essay on 21st century abolitionist rhetoric. - Jon Radwan and Angela Kariotis

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

Religion - All Scholarship

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

The Prince -- Brief Synopsis -- Powerpoint, Zach Davidson

Open Educational Resources

This is a very brief PowerPoint covering some key ideas in Machiavelli's THE PRINCE.

Full Disclosure / Now What?, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction: The Politics, Praxis, And Performativity Of Teacher Neutrality, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward An Ecofeminist Embodied Pedagogy: A Study Of Difference In Online And Offline Community Writing Courses, Rachel Dortin

Wayne State University Dissertations

Toward an Ecofeminist Embodied Pedagogy: A Study of Difference in Online and Offline Community Writing Courses argues that service-learning and community-engaged learning (SCEL) often fail to present community partners as real, embodied beings. Rather, students often believe that there is an “us” (the university) and a “them” (the community). Entering community partnerships with this perspective can be damaging, for both students and community partners, and result in unsuccessful collaborations. My dissertation responds to this problem by offering an ecofeminist, embodied pedagogy (EEP) as a solution. I argue that students are eager to learn about difference and that instructors need to …

Curricular Inquiry: A Survey Of Writing Pedagogy Practicum Instructors, Clare Jennifer Russell

Wayne State University Dissertations

The practicum course, a required course for many new college writing instructors, is a vital site for identifying what are considered best practices in the teaching of college composition, but also for critiquing, revising, and reevaluating those practices. My dissertation contributes to the conversation about how Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) learn to teach college composition, and how what they learn in teaching practicum courses impacts graduate education in Rhetoric and Composition. My dissertation study focuses on the perspectives of instructors who design practica courses that prepare college writing instructors to teach first-year composition at their institutions. GTAs in Writing Studies, …

Named But Not Known: Teaching And Assessing The Research-Writing Process, Ruth Boeder

Wayne State University Dissertations

In lived experience, the two processes of secondary research and writing overlap and intertwine interminably, creating an overarching complex system as research becomes expressed in writing and writing generates new research. This classroom study explores the two processes as one—the research-writing process—through coding of student journal responses and assessment of student research papers. Analysis reveals students to be thoughtful but not yet as nuanced in their descriptions of their research process as much be desired. They more frequently discuss writing with weaknesses in their research process than with research strengths. Further findings indicate that although it is difficult to assess …

Hear Me Roar, Abigail R. Seethoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.

From Small Beginnings To Large-Scale Harm: On Demagoguery And Misogyny In The Classroom And Writing Center, Shannon Roberson

Theses and Dissertations

My project is grounded in the rhetorical concept of aretê—excellence or virtue—as it relates to education and educational spaces within demagogic and misogynist cultural forces. The problems of demagoguery and misogyny stem from small-scale perpetuation of agonistic norms that go unaddressed in U.S. culture, a culture that is deeply identity-driven. These forces persist on social media platforms and within patriarchal systems of education.

For my project, I suggest rhetorical media literacy education of small-scale demagoguery moments on social media as a way to bring awareness to larger-scale events. On a micro-scale, social media influencers cultivate behaviors that mimic demagogic …

Institutional Narrative As A Means For Evaluating Mission Alignment At Community Colleges, Paul Wesley Lundburg

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Community colleges have expanded their goals and their mission statements to accommodate more students, introduce new programs, and respond to community needs. One result of this expansion has been the perception of mission misalignment: the idea that community colleges are struggling to fulfill their missions. Recent literature has focused on causes and problems presumed to be associated with mission misalignment; however, there is a gap in the empirical research on whether mission misalignment occurs. The purpose of this study was to examine mission misalignment in community colleges, thereby helping to fill the gap in the literature. The research question was …

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, …

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 …