Communication Commons^™

Drama: A Burlesque And Melodramatic Frame Analysis Of The January 6Th Committee Final Report, Makayla Chadwick Lindsay

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

On January 6^th, 2021, former president Donald Trump stated "...if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore". Following his speech thousands of Trump supporters marched to the United States capitol under the belief that they were stopping nationwide voter fraud. In the months following, the U.S. congress created The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol with the goal to investigate those responsible for the insurrection that took place at the U.S. capitol. This paper examines the committee's communication as they attempted to hold Trump …

Older Women’S Stories Of Covid-19 Loss: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Through Photography, Anne Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The diverse array of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic make it difficult to assess the full impact of this global health crisis. More than 300,000 older Americans died, leaving a nation of grieving survivors in their absence. This profound loss of life will undoubtedly inform the field’s understanding of grief and grieving for many years to come. Pre-pandemic, older women in the United States understood grief to be part of their life stage; COVID-19 amplified the grief experience through both cumulative losses and the isolation particular to the novel coronavirus response. However, few qualitative studies explore older women’s grief, …

Something Wicked: Witches And Rhetorics Of Resistance, K. Scarlett Harrington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project joins other academic conversations regarding the dynamics of power, modernity, witchcraft, and magic within the contexts of Western hegemony. Occasioned by kairotic cultural events and the reinforcement of ideologies like those found in the Dobbs decision, QAnon conspiracy, and rise of Christian Nationalism, this project contends that evaluating the potential political power residing in witchery is necessary in understanding some of the nuances of hegemonic control and resistance to oppressive authority. Predominantly following rhetorical evaluations of magic found in the works of Gunn and Covino, I maintain a non-universal methodological practice that works to understand the various instrumentality …

Black Quarterback, White Masks: A Critical Analysis Of The Nfl Anthem Protests, Cody Walizer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The NFL anthem protests were and are an important cultural moment and social movement. The widespread emulation of the protest, and the adoption of the kneel as a symbol of unity, reverence, and silent objection demonstrates the protests’ continued relevance. This dissertation critically analyzes Colin Kaepernick’s protest through the lens of racial rhetorical criticism (Flores, 2016) and Fanonian communication studies (Towns, 2020). Through the case studies of David Brooks, Lee Siegel, and Colin Fleming, and their New York Times opinion pieces on Kaepernick from 2016-17, this study argues that the common discourses surrounding the protest exist within the strategic rhetoric …

Memorable Messages Received By Bereaved Parents: Using Attribution Theory To Understand Hurt And Compassion, April Samaras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The communication bereaved parents have with family members, friends, colleagues, and healthcare providers following the death of a child can serve as a great comfort or exacerbate their grief. In order to understand this communication and why bereaved parents find it helpful or harmful, this study examines bereaved parents' experiences of compassionate and hurtful communication using the frameworks of memorable messages (Stohl & Reardon, 1981) and attribution theory (Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967). Fifty bereaved parents who lost a child between birth and 25-years-old completed an online survey. Tracy’s (2018) iterative analysis method revealed four types of compassionate messages: …

The Examination Of Social Support Received After Traumatic Experiences, Emily Abellon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to explore what constitutes effective and ineffective social support after an individual endures trauma. Participants were recruited mainly through social media to complete an online survey with open-ended questions. The survey provided participants with the opportunity to reflect and share the social support they received after the endured trauma, specifically disclosing what support messages were effective and ineffective, and why these messages were effective and ineffective. The messages found to be effectively supportive after the endured trauma, and the ones most frequently mentioned were emotional and appraisal support. These messages were found to be effective due to …

Women Of Appalachia: Common Ground, Different Matriarch, Cecelia A. Bagnoli

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

"Not Liberating Women Means The Building Of A Socialist Society Is Only Half-Way Done": A Feminist Analysis Of Ho Chi Minh's Advocacy For The First Law On Marriage And Family In 1959 Vietnam, Hannah Nguyen

Senior Independent Study Theses

In October 1959, Ho Chi Minh attended and spoke before the North Vietnamese National Assembly at the “Meeting to Discuss the Draft of the Law on Marriage and Family.” The purpose of this study is to provide a feminist rhetorical analysis of this address to explicate the rhetorical strategies Ho employed to advocate for this law. I argue that Ho reframed the Marriage and Family Law into a policy that corresponded to the needs and demands of the National Assembly through methods of dissociation, association, and strategic repetition. I also found that Ho employed a dual leader/uncle first persona to …

On Healing Hearts: A Saudi Woman Perspective On The Experience Of Baby Loss, Art, And Compassion, Alaa Saeed Alkhalaf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation, “On Healing HeARTs: A Saudi Woman’s Perspective on the Experience of Baby Loss,” investigates how Shia Saudi bereaved mothers create meaning and make sense of their experience of baby loss. It explores the importance of art and compassion in the healing process. Using a multi-method design that includes art-based methods and autoethnography, I narrate my own experience of baby loss. The study relies on theories of sense-making and constructivism to interpret my findings. Looking at the experience from a unique cultural lens enables the readers and health providers to comprehend how certain cultural factors contribute to both the …

The Ghost Town: An Autoethnographic Study On The Effects Of Loss And Trauma On A Saudi Arabian International Student’S Well-Being, Salman J. Alzowibi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We all have fought on grief’s battleground; some of us started at early ages, while others during their developmental age, teen’s years, or later in their adulthood. All of them are valuable resources and sites of knowledge that need to be explored. Yet, recent studies reduced grief into clinical psychological well-being. However, as I lived these experiences, trauma, loss, and grief impact all well-being dimensions. Grief intersects with large structures (e.g., social, economic, cultural, locations, etc.); all these components impact our way of grief how socially displayed (mourning). This dissertation encapsulates my personal experience elevating it to an academic work …

Fatty Fatty Two-By-Four—Can’T Get Through The Dressing Room Door?: An Examination Of Excess As Queer Failure, Miranda Dottie Olzman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Failure and fat are not linear. It is taught, learned, reminded, and internalized. Our bodies have memories that are built through repeated moments. And for me, failure has been a part of my body’s map since I was born. This project is the culmination of many failures. In this dissertation, I am examining queer failure in multiple contexts including body size, as well as religion to create a corpulent critique. I do this by examining the lineage of queer failure as well as queer temporality as it is linked to failure (Edelman; Muñoz; Halberstam; Love) with fat queer bodies serving …

“It's Like A Phantom Limb. It Feels Like It’S There. It's Supposed To Be There, But It's Not.”: Birthmothers’ Metaphors Of Ambiguous Loss, Melodee Lynn Sova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Birthmothers are a population with unique experiences and challenges. Among those challenges is the difficulty understanding and managing a loss for which they do not have a readily available coping strategy. As a birthmother, the author of this dissertation was uniquely situated to connecting with, and understanding the ways in which, birthmothers expressed their narratives. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the ways in which birthmothers make sense of their experiences with ambiguous loss by examining the metaphors they employ when narrating their adoption story. The use of metaphor in the birthmother narrative was especially important because metaphor …

The Ghosts Of Grief: An Exploration Of Gothic Influence In 2010s Horror Cinema, Halen Gifford

Senior Independent Study Theses

The purpose of this project is to examine gothic influences in contemporary horror cinema of the 2010s. To fulfill this purpose, the study employs comparative film analysis methods to analyze The Babadook (2014), The Invitation (2015), and Crimson Peak (2015) in order to identify intertextual gothic references in the cinematography, mise en scène, and narratives of the films. Specifically, this project examines the haunted house trope in the horror genre as characterized by the presence of ghosts and the personification of the setting. Through this analysis, four common themes emerged: “Houses with Personality,” “Tragic Losses,” “Memories and Ghosts,” and “Isolation.” …

“Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves”: Creating A Financial Literacy Workshop For College-Aged Women On The Relationship Among Spending, Saving, And Investing, Lesley Chinery

Senior Independent Study Theses

The purpose of this study is to create a financial literacy workshop for college-aged women to increase understanding of the relationship among spending, saving, and investing. Utilizing relevant scholarship on gender and economics, the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and interviews with experts in economics and with facilitators of financial literacy workshops, I created a virtual workshop for college-aged women. This research found that successfully enabling both central and peripheral processing routes plays a significant role in attracting potential participants to workshops and in turn, cognitively engages them during workshops. Moreover, planners of workshops need to ensure consistent appealing messaging in communication …

Breaking News: Sustainable Fashion Is In And Fast Fashion Is Out; Constructions Of Sustainable Consumption In Fast Fashion Advertising, Camryn Eve Rosenstein

Senior Independent Study Theses

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the pivotal role advertising plays in fast fashion consumption and shaping young consumers ideas and values about the fashion industry, fast fashion, sustainable consumption, and sustainability. This study contributes to limited research into greenwashing and consumer perceptions and attitudes towards sustainable consumption. Moreover, this study highlights the increased relevance of the sustainable fashion movement in mainstream society. The researcher recruited 30 college students to participants in focus group sessions and individual interviews. An H&M advertisement and a video clip from a documentary, The True Cost, were shown to participants, so …

Black Outside: A Film Exploring Black People’S Relationships With Outdoor Spaces, Zoie Bills

Senior Independent Study Theses

Spending time in nature is regarded as a great way to have fun and improve one’s mental or physical health. Black people are largely underrepresented in public parks and other outdoor spaces. My film explores the lack of Black presence in outdoor spaces in an effort to promote Black people’s usage of these places. I used interviews with students, environmental activists, and my own family in order to explore the scholarly, structural, cultural, and personal factors that impact Black folks’ engagement with the outdoors. The interviews revealed several major takeaways including that Black people have historical roots in outdoor spaces …

Branding Small Businesses In Small Communities, Lacey Jenkins

Masters Theses

Branding has grown into a vital part of communicating a brand to its audience members. Unfortunately, large portions of branding tactics are geared towards large corporations in large communities. Small and mid-sized businesses require different tactics in order to create a brand that effectively communicates its purpose and values to its consumers. Because of this, this thesis is looking at the branding tactics of a small business in Charleston, Illinois. This business, Phoenix Elite, showed weaknesses in multiple areas of its branding package. Using a literature review, the goal is to create a better understanding of what branding is, as …

Performances Of An Able, Academic Mind, Caleb Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Western culture individualizes issues of public health. This is especially clear in academic life, where the structures of the university disable atypical bodies and minds in order to force them to simultaneously perform the roles of scholar, teacher, and colleague. The university not only fails to accommodate afflicted minds and bodies, it also produces more precarity in the process. This project is a performance ethnography of my time in the academy, starting with my life as an undergraduate being disciplined into academic life, moving toward recruitment for graduate school, and ending with events surrounding the construction of this very project. …

The Colored Pill: A History Film Performance Exposing Race Based Medicines, Wanda Lakota

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Of the 32 pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA in 2005, one medicine stood out. That medicine, BiDil®, was a heart failure medication that set a precedent for being the first approved race based drug for African Americans. Though BiDil®, was the first race specific medicine, racialized bodies have been used all throughout history to advance medical knowledge. The framework for race, history, and racialized drugs was so multi-tiered; it could not be conceptualized from a single perspective. For this reason, this study examines racialized medicine through performance, history, and discourse analysis.

The focus of this work aimed …

Performing Ir, Charles Darwin Lulevitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is an attempt to create a new way of understanding international relations, which is defined here as knowledge and practice that informs us of the nature, goals, and actors of international politics. At the core of the research is a simple concern, but one I am still rather unsure I have thought of enough: what does it mean to create a different discourse? The argument made is that international relations as we know it, is a discourse centered on state, sovereignty, and anarchy, and also white, hegemonic masculine culture, which forces us to maintain that culture’s social dominance. …

Dis/Ableist Consumption: A Critical Thematic Analysis Of Avowed And Ascribed Neuro-Identities In The Classroom, Shaundi C. Newbolt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, faculty and students are publicly claiming neurodivergent identities and support for the neurodiversity movement. This study uses Collier and Hecht’s cultural identity theories with Lang and Chen’s two-step process, critical thematic analysis (CTA), to examine avowals and ascriptions with four diagnostic terms, ASD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and dyslexia, of students and professors from Rate My Professors (RMP) with Ritter’s frame of RMP as a phenomenon.

A total of 1,022 posts are analyzed to understand how students resist or re-inscribe popular medical model/deficit discourse in the classroom: student avowals (N = 232), professor avowals (N = 51), …

Rhetorical Genealogy And The Ethics Of Eugenics, David Mark Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation strives to critique contemporary rhetoric on eugenics. In recent years, scientists succeeded in mapping the human genome and subsequently developed new gene editing technologies. To situate current ethical discourses about eugenics, I trace histories of these discourses at several scales of society – from the macroscopic level of the body politic to the meso level where modes of assessment have been deployed purportedly to accurately evaluate human characteristics to the microscopic level of the gene. I employ Foucauldian genealogy to highlight how, despite marked differences over time in specific eugenic discourses and practices exist, the underlying rhetoric has …

@Gretathunberg: Navigating Critique And Identity Within Youth Climate Activism On Twitter, Carina Robin Weadock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Youth climate activist Greta Thunberg sat alone on the steps of the Swedish Parliament building in September of 2018, holding a bold black and white sign and demanding action be taken in the face of the climate crisis. Ever since, her activism and Twitter presence have sparked media attention, catalyzed youth activists globally to organize marches and strike from school, and have drawn critique. This thesis employs McKerrow’s (1989) critical rhetoric to uncover dominant discourses within tweets that undermine Thunberg based on identity and to explore the potential that Thunberg’s Twitter presence might or might not hold for future youth …

Understanding Behavioral And Emotional Responses To Frames Used By Animal Rights Organizations In The United States And France, Alysa Tarrant

Senior Independent Study Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine how varying demographics among French and American populations responded to three types of frames used by animal rights organizations: ethical, environmental, and health related. A two by three experimental design in which participants saw two images corresponding to one of the three frames was distributed. The survey measured each respondent’s political opinions, emotional response, and behavioral response through self-designed scales. The study finds that culture and political ideologies play a significant role in influencing frame response, such that the French respondents were more emotionally and behaviorally influenced than Americans, and that liberals …

Use Your Head: A Frame Analysis Of Digital Media On Concussions In The National Football League Using The Health Belief Model And The Extended Parallel Process Model, Harrison Stow Witwer-Dukes

Senior Independent Study Theses

Over the past decade, the topic of concussions in the National Football League has increased in discourse as more information about the long term effects of head injuries has come out. The way the media portrays the topic has a significant impact on how the general public perceives the issue, as well as how solutions to the issue are proposed. The purpose of this study is to perform a frame analysis on 30 digital media news articles from 2009-2019. The frames presented in the study are based on elements from the Health Belief Model and the Extended Parallel Process Model. …

Does This Grant Them Agency? An Analysis Of The Female Athlete As Portrayed In Espn's Body Issue, Aubri Mckoy

Senior Independent Study Theses

Since 2009, one of the world’s largest and most circulated sports mediums, ESPN, has been publishing an annual nude magazine. Formerly known as ESPN’s Body Issue, this magazine seeks to highlight aesthetics of the athletic form, as well as the power of testimony told through the inhabited bodies of the magazine’s featured athletes. Over the years, the magazine has featured many identities, including the representation of varying races, genders, body types, physical abilities, and sports. This study particularly examines the representation of a Black woman athlete, Tori Bowie, as featured in the magazine’s tenth edition. Furthermore, this study focuses on …

Julia De Burgos, Embodied Excess, And (Un)Silenced Memory: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis Of Performances Of Resistance, Sara Johanna Baugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation makes an argument for a decolonial move in rhetorical memory studies to more ethically account for the ways in which colonized women in the Global South, like Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary Julia de Burgos, have resisted the trauma colonization has systemically wrought against gendered, raced, and classed bodies. Building from a decolonization methodology, and theoretically situating my argument in Chicana, Latina, and decolonial feminisms, I argue Burgos's poetry both bears faithful witness to the violence of US imperial rule and articulates the dangers of a Puerto Rican nationalist movement built on a Spanish colonial foundation. Approaching Burgos …

A Child Shall Lead Them: Exploring Discourses Of Efficacy And Climate Change As They Appear In Children's Animated Film, Jason Derry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent climate change discourse has tended to presume scientific knowledge and rational argumentation as the principle factor in convincing peoples and publics toward climate action. However, scholarship across numerous fields reveals myriad other contributing factors in how people think about and respond to this environmental crisis, which leans predominately toward silence and apathy. Alongside this, children are often centered as inheriting a calamity, yet find themselves largely disempowered. From out of this rhetorical milieu I interject by way of a multidisciplinary grounding to examine the predominate framings of efficacy in the context of children, climate change, and environmental discourse. To …

Social Aspects Of Food-Sensitive Adults, Jean Elizabeth Duane

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People living with food-related illnesses find themselves subjugated by commonly held ideologies causing awkwardness in social situations. The current study is a qualitative analysis addressing how people with celiac disease (CD) navigate social situations in light of dominant beliefs that influence behaviors. Initially, I identify macro-level patriarchal, religious, sexist, ableist and etiquette-related commensality ideologies that disadvantage those with CD. Drawing from the communication narrative sense making (CNSM) theory that supports storytelling and memorable messages as a sense-making tool for individuals diagnosed with chronic illness and their family members, this work highlights retrospective stories and memorable messages from 20 randomly selected …

Dominating The Disease: A Transnational Feminist Perspective Of U.S. Health Coloniality, Jessica Ann Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

HIV has been a pandemic since the 1980s with 70 million people infected since the beginning, about 35 million people have died of complications resulting from HIV, and an estimated 36.9 million people living with HIV in 2017 (WHO, "HIV and AIDS"). Many organizations around the world have tried to tackle this issue, however most of these organizations are based in the West or have Western organizations holding the majority of power and control. People in these organizations have the intention of ending the spread of HIV, but they also sometimes spread Western ideology.

This work brings together communication scholarship …