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Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, And The Public Sphere, Ayala Fader, Owen Gottlieb Jul 2015

Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, And The Public Sphere, Ayala Fader, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides an analysis of Occupy Judaism, an explicitly religious expression of Jewish protest, which occurred simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, the direct-democracy movement of 2011. Occupy Judaism, like Occupy Wall Street, took place both in physical spaces of protest in New York City and digitally, through mobilizing and circulating debate. The article focuses on the words and actions of Daniel Sieradski, the public face and one of the key founders of Occupy Judaism, supplemented by the experiences of others in Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Faith (a Protestant clergy-led initiative). We investigate what qualified as religion …


From The Gay Bar To The Search Bar: Promiscuity, Identity, And Queer Mobility On Grindr, Chase Aunspach Apr 2015

From The Gay Bar To The Search Bar: Promiscuity, Identity, And Queer Mobility On Grindr, Chase Aunspach

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a critical exploration into the mobile application Grindr and how it rhetorically constitutes its users and their experience of queer spaces. Recently, researchers from a variety of disciplines have displayed increased scholarly interest in Grindr. Despite this much needed attention, few studies before this thesis have examined Grindr’s material structure—its interface, scripts, and other design features—as rhetorical and worthy of analysis. I document and interrogate my own experiences as a user of the application, adding a humanistic perspective to current conversations about Grindr to demonstrate one potential approach to critiquing mobile media that extends the “field” of …


Democratic Potential For A Multiplicity Of Public Spaces: A Content Analysis Of Media-Hosted Discussion Boards, Bryan M. Baldwin Mar 2015

Democratic Potential For A Multiplicity Of Public Spaces: A Content Analysis Of Media-Hosted Discussion Boards, Bryan M. Baldwin

Doctoral Dissertations

Since their inception, online discussion boards have intrinsically appealed to proponents of deliberative democracy, and those appended to Web-based news sources have been recognized as possessing the potential – whether realized yet or not – to engender meaningful discussions by engaged citizens on a range of public issues. In contrast, ardent critics of such forums contend they are merely raucous and unstructured repositories of expressions reflecting the darker side of human nature (e.g. incivility, vulgarity, ad hominem attacks, racism, homophobia, etc.). This study assessed the deliberative quality of online postings made over a two- month period and affiliated with four …


Leave Them (Texting) Kidz Alone, Melody Bowdon Jan 2015

Leave Them (Texting) Kidz Alone, Melody Bowdon

UCF Forum

By trade, I am a professor of writing and rhetoric. In layman’s terms, this makes me an English teacher. These are deeply dreaded words for many people. When I identify my profession to new acquaintances, I get a range of responses: obviously, some people don’t find it that interesting—it’s not like I’m an astronaut or plastic surgeon, and everyone has known her or his fair share of English teachers. Others, though, have very strong reactions, letting me know that they hate English or have never been “good at it.”


Living Proof: Autobiographical Political Argument In We Are The 99 Percent And We Are The 53 Percent, Doron Taussig Jan 2015

Living Proof: Autobiographical Political Argument In We Are The 99 Percent And We Are The 53 Percent, Doron Taussig

Media and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

People often cite life experiences as evidence in political arguments, though personal experience is far from generalizable. How do these arguments work? In this paper, I consider the rhetorical dynamics of “autobiographical political argument” by examining We are the 99 Percent and We are the 53 Percent, two blogs that use autobiographical stories to make discursive points. I argue that these autobiographical appeals efficiently use all three of Aristotle’s persuasive “proofs”—logos (logic), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion). Then I show that many of the blogs’ stories focus on “redemption,” a theme personality psychologists have found emphasized in the narrative …


Bloggers And Their Impact On Contemporary Social Movements: A Phenomenological Examination Of The Role Of Blogs And Their Creators In The Lgbt Social Movements In Modern United States, Bobby K. Huen Jan 2015

Bloggers And Their Impact On Contemporary Social Movements: A Phenomenological Examination Of The Role Of Blogs And Their Creators In The Lgbt Social Movements In Modern United States, Bobby K. Huen

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

The Internet is a ubiquitous feature in everyday life, but its application to social movements has yet to be completely understood. This phenomenological study examines the lived experiences of bloggers who focused on the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement in the United States to understand the impact bloggers and their work as online activists have on existing LGBT social movement organization and operation. Data collection is gathered from semi-structured and open-ended interviews with four social movement bloggers using web-conference software over the course of three months. The results of this study indicated that internet has empowered individual activists, …