Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Voices Of The Say Her Name Campaign: Theorizing An Activist Rhetoric Of Blame, Alisa Davis

Theses and Dissertations

There is a lack of research in communication scholarship that analyzes how Black women employ blame from their unique standpoint. To combat this, this thesis analyzes the Say Her Name Campaign to demonstrate the ways Black women employ an activist rhetoric of blame that deconstructs their historical erasure in the discourse about antiblack police violence. Drawing upon Black feminist scholarship and epideictic rhetoric, I argue that an activist rhetoric of blame, used by Black women, dramatically puts on display the life of individuals who have experienced injustices and exposes blameworthy misogynoir attitudes in order to criticize the inherent flaws within …

'Would You Say You Had Sex If...' Rhetorical Meaning-Making Within Intimate Encounters And Their Discourses At The Macro, Meso, And Micro Levels, Megan Orcholski

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advances a deeper understanding of the rhetoric of intimate encounters by analyzing meaning-making practices at the intersections of sex, sexuality, and sexualized violence at the macro, meso, and micro levels. The object of my analysis is discourse about sex, sexuality, and sexualized violence, but this analysis also has implications on understandings of how corporeal rhetorics, or communicative meaning within bodies, are operating in moments of intimate encounters. Throughout my chapters, I interrogate how normative scripts around sex are constructed, disseminated, and perpetuated, how these normative assumptions impact intimate encounters and their connected public discourses, and how these normative …

Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening Up Possibilities For Chronic Pain In Disability Rhetoric And Rhetoric And Composition, Hilary Selznick

Theses and Dissertations

In the dissertation “Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening up Possibilities for Chronic Pain in Disability Rhetoric and Rhetoric and Composition,” Hilary Selznick argues that pain is rhetorical, accessible, and communicable to those without the lived experience of chronic pain. Additionally, she argues for the necessity of considering chronic pain as a disability and not merely as a symptom of a disability. In order to make these arguments possible, Selznick crafts a political-relational-rhetorical methodology that challenges restrictive models of disability and theoretical and commonplace assumptions that pain is resistant to language. Specifically, Selznick’s methodology, which combines disability scholar and activist Alison …

Mass Media’S Cultivation Effect On Islamic, Muslim, And Qur’Anic Prejudice, Shanna J. Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the power of the mass media’s ability to cultivate reality in terms of the threat of Islam. A rhetorical analysis of the messages portrayed by the mass media is then compared to the findings of the study. While the study did not find any significant correlation between consumption of media and fear of Muslims, the Qur’an, or Islam, it did find a strong negative correlation between inter-group contact and salience of stereotypes.

Collective Management In A Cooperative: Problematizing Productivity And Power, Avery Edenfield

Theses and Dissertations

Since the mid-twentieth century, the structure of the workplace has undergone a transformation. While the conventional firm with its rigid bureaucracies is still in use, many businesses have grown increasingly flexible, flat, and polycentric: “empowerment” and “innovation” are the coin of the realm. As the way we work changed, professional communication scholarship pivoted to consider communication practices in these structures.

While professional communication scholars have long discussed these kinds of organizations, they have not discussed an increasingly popular alternative: cooperatives. Owned and operated by the people who use them, these organizations can significantly affect the communities in which they operate. …

Ideographs And American Mass Media: Understanding The Narrative On The Israel-Palestine Conflict And Its Influence On Publics, Savanna Lynn Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired …

Materiality, Craft, Identity, And Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing Pedagogy, Kristin Prins

Theses and Dissertations

Too often in Rhetoric and Composition, multimodal writing (an expansive practice of opening up the media and modes with which writers might work) is reduced to digital writing. “Reworking Digital Writing” argues that the opportunities and insights of digital writing should encourage us to turn our attention to all kinds of nondigital materials that have not traditionally been considered part of composing—including the materials that are already familiar to crafters and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers). Further, I argue that the material, technical, rhetorical, economic, and social dimensions of DIY craft provide a coherent framework for teaching multimodal writing in ways that encourage …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Catholic Feminism: Understanding Prophetic And Deliberative Responses To The Institutional Catholic Church, Mridula Mascarenhas

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contrasts the Catholic Church's rhetorical framing of feminist activism within the Church against the rhetoric of two organizations that speak on behalf of Catholic feminism. The study conceptualizes the engagement between the Church hierarchy and the feminists as a chorus of voices, each claiming to advocate for authentically Catholic principles. The rhetorical voice of each agent is analyzed to uncover underlying rhetorical strategies. The dissertation argues that although the Church establishment, through the use of the doctrinal voice, claims a contradiction between Catholicism and radical feminism, Catholic feminists attempt to dissolve the alleged contradiction with the use of …

Crime And Poverty In Detroit: A Cross-Referential Critical Analysis Of Ideographs And Framing, Jacob Jerome Nickell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the relationship between crime and poverty is rhetorically constructed within the news media. To this end, I investigate the content of twelve news articles, published online, that offered coverage of crime in the city of Detroit, Michigan. I employ three methods in my criticism of these texts: ideographic analysis, critical framing analysis, and an approach that considers ideographs and framings elements to be rhetorical constructions that function together. In each phase of my analysis, I developed ideological themes from concepts emerging from the texts. I then approached my discussion of these findings from a perspective of …

Fashioning A Rhetoric Of Style: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Urban Street Style Representations In New York City, Amber Pineda

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how urban street styles are used rhetorically within local boroughs in New York City as a form of resistance to the dominant fashion industry that dictates what is "in fashion" through media. A total of fifteen video blogs developed by The New York Times were analyzed, each containing a representation of one of the five boroughs of New York City: Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens. The analysis identified themes of a rhetoric of style, consisting of primacy of text, imaginary communities, aesthetic rationales, market contexts, and stylistic homologies. These themes were then analyzed by drawing …

Rhetorical Ripples: The Church Of The Subgenius, Kenneth Burke & Comic, Symbolic Tinkering, Lee A. Carleton

Theses and Dissertations

Humor has long been an effective way to engage difficult sociopolitical topics in a way that avoids polemical confrontation and provides opportunity for pleasure, catharsis and self-knowledge. In the context of today’s polarized politics and protest, creative satirical performance that deploys “symbolic tinkering” can provide a “comic frame of reference” that, according to Kenneth Burke, more effectively conveys its message while providing reflexive insight. The satirical Church of the SubGenius naturally practices this rhetorical frame in their multimedia creations. Using the lens of Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, this essay is an analysis of SubGenius rhetoric with a focus on …

The Rhetorical Construction Of Female Empowerment: The Avenging-Woman Narrative In Popular Television And Film, Lara C. Stache

Theses and Dissertations

In this critical rhetorical analysis, I examine the contemporary avenging-woman narrative in popular television and film. As a rhetorical text, the avenging-woman narrative can be read as a representation of cultural constructions of female empowerment. In this project, I situate the contemporary avenging-woman narrative within the context of a contemporary third wave feminist culture, in order to articulate how the representations of female empowerment in the texts may be a negotiation of cultural tensions about feminism. The four primary texts chosen for inclusion within this study are made up of two television shows, Revenge (2011-present) and Veronica Mars (2003-2007), and …

"Woman Arise!": Political Work In The Writings Of Lu Dalton, Sheree Maxwell Bench

Theses and Dissertations

In 1872, Mormon plural wife, educator, and suffragist Lucinda Lee Dalton began writing fiery political essays and insightful poetry for the Woman's Exponent from her small community in southern Utah. Through her writings Dalton endeavors to shape the opinions of Exponent readers by working within public discourse toward the goal of equality for women. At times both optimistic and troubled, she uses the rhetorical strategies of humor, irony, reason, identification, and persuasion to educate men and women on disparities and to encourage women to participate actively in their own emancipation. She often engages in a dialogical process with other writers …

An Analysis Of The Speaking Style Of Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Leader, James Francis O'Connor

Theses and Dissertations

The primary function of this thesis was to determine, through the analysis of three randomly selected speeches, the speaking style of Heber C. Kimball. The selected speeches were presented in three different utah locations, and they covered a span of nine years (1856-65). All three speeches were presented to a Mormon audience and were religious in nature.

Seven elements of style have been used for the analysis of the three speeches. They are: accuracy, clarity, propriety, economy, force, striking quality, and liveliness. It was determined that President Kimball's speaking style was weak in the areas of accuracy and clarity. In …