Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

Argumentation For Critical Heterogenous Political Discussions: Constructing A Rebuttal, Rebecca Oliver Nov 2023

Argumentation For Critical Heterogenous Political Discussions: Constructing A Rebuttal, Rebecca Oliver

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

This activity seeks to explain to undergraduate students how to craft a proper attack and defense in argumentation and debate, persuasion, or political communication courses. The activity teaches students 1) the parts of a basic argument structure and 2) how to construct a rebuttal using a basic argument structure. Students will argue against their true political typology by selecting an opposing typology from the Pew Research Typology Quiz. Broadly, this exercise is designed to encourage students to engage in dialogues with people who disagree with their political positionality. Specifically, the activity accomplishes this by teaching students the value of basic …


Encoding & Decoding: Artfully Modeling Communication, Daniel L. Foster, Ashley D. Garcia Nov 2023

Encoding & Decoding: Artfully Modeling Communication, Daniel L. Foster, Ashley D. Garcia

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

Drawing objects and concepts, such as cats, trees, love, democracy, and family, is probably the last activity students expect to do in a communication course. Although this sounds like an introductory art activity, creating visual representations provides a nuanced understanding of the encoding and decoding processes. Encoding and decoding are the most hidden and often the most unfamiliar and complex fundamental components of communication for students to comprehend. By engaging in this activity, students translate their decoding process into drawings, which serve as personal artifacts representative of their encoding and decoding. Students come to better conceptualize this cognitive process with …


“Party In The Communication Classroom”: Exploring Communication Competence To Raise Social Awareness, Nancy Bressler Nov 2023

“Party In The Communication Classroom”: Exploring Communication Competence To Raise Social Awareness, Nancy Bressler

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

This activity demonstrates communication competence and allows students to observe, assess, and ultimately utilize the model of communication competence to engage with other people successfully. To understand how to engage in communication competence, students must recognize that appropriateness and effectiveness are crucial aspects of their communication. Through the communication competence model, students examine how to achieve effectiveness in their communication by setting goals for specific contexts; they also consider to what extent their goals are achievable given the particular situation. Using a 2014 MTV Video Music Award example, students can analyze why Miley Cyrus allowed a homeless man to accept …


Introducing Public Speaking Self-Concept (Pssc): A Novel, Qualitatively-Derived Communication Anxiety And Competence Variable, Karla M. Hunter, Joshua N. Westwick Nov 2023

Introducing Public Speaking Self-Concept (Pssc): A Novel, Qualitatively-Derived Communication Anxiety And Competence Variable, Karla M. Hunter, Joshua N. Westwick

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

Despite numerous quantitative assessments of teaching interventions that have helped mitigate public speaking anxiety (PSA), this common barrier to public speaking persists. In addition, quantitative measures may not be appropriate for all instructional goals, especially with students from across a variety of cultures. To enrich educators’ capacity to help diverse bodies of students overcome the challenges presented by PSA, this qualitative study asked students to “Please describe yourself as a public speaker” at the beginning and the end of a freshman-level, general education public speaking class. Thematic analysis identified a two-dimensional pattern within student responses (N = 51) (a …


Front Matter Nov 2023

Front Matter

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.


Discourse: The Journal Of The Scasd, Volume 8 (2023), The Speech Communication Association Of South Dakota Nov 2023

Discourse: The Journal Of The Scasd, Volume 8 (2023), The Speech Communication Association Of South Dakota

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.


Queer Crises: Movements From Queerness And Feelings Of White Religion In The United States, Austin Williams Miller Aug 2023

Queer Crises: Movements From Queerness And Feelings Of White Religion In The United States, Austin Williams Miller

Communication ETDs

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how …


“We Felt Powerful And Rebellious”: Contested Spaces, Lesbian Identity, And The Evolution Of Separatism, Sarah Cooper May 2023

“We Felt Powerful And Rebellious”: Contested Spaces, Lesbian Identity, And The Evolution Of Separatism, Sarah Cooper

All Dissertations

Drawing on theoretical perspectives from lesbian studies, queer theory and studies and, feminist rhetorics while using rhetorical analysis, interviews, and archival research, this project traces the relationships lesbians have had to place, through case studies. To date, research on how space occupancy or land practices have contributed to the constitution of a contemporary lesbian identity in the United States lack scholarly attention. My following chapters ask: how has separatism historically and at present contributed to the constitution of lesbian identity? To answer, I turn to archival evidence of women’s lands in Southern Oregon, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and Olivia Travel. …


The Relevance Of Shame Across Time And Location, Miranda Vander Berg, Kari Sandouka Feb 2023

The Relevance Of Shame Across Time And Location, Miranda Vander Berg, Kari Sandouka

SDSU Data Science Symposium

Twitter is used among various entities professionals, politicians, and the general public as an online social network. Many tweets are informational, but others are reactive based on judgment that leads to public shaming. In response to the book “The Shame Machine” (by Cathy O’Neil), we look at Tweets to determine a linguistical and content analysis of shame. The research focuses on content analysis to define if a tweet contains language that is deduced as public shaming. Other factors relating to the tweet are the time, date, location of the author, and if it’s the initial post or a response to …


Presidents And Media During Initial Federal-Level Hurricane Relief: A Study Of Presidential Crisis Communication Efforts, Emily A. Ball Jan 2023

Presidents And Media During Initial Federal-Level Hurricane Relief: A Study Of Presidential Crisis Communication Efforts, Emily A. Ball

Honors College Theses

Public relations serves a huge role in almost every sector, including politics. Crisis communication, a subset of public relations, is very important in a setting that constantly undergoes crises. The response to these crises matters a great deal on the federal level because the outcomes can affect such a wide variety of policies and even elections. Because of this, I wanted to focus on one type of crisis that every president is almost guaranteed to face: hurricanes. To examine the effectiveness of federal-level crisis communication, I look at Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden’s responses to the worst hurricane during their …


Right Turn At Reality: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Right Wing Negotiations On Race And Masculinity In Online Spaces, Andrew R.J. Hart Jan 2023

Right Turn At Reality: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Right Wing Negotiations On Race And Masculinity In Online Spaces, Andrew R.J. Hart

MSU Graduate Theses

The effects of right wing politically charged violence are more visible now than at any other point in recent American history. The Internet, and social media more specifically, has become a crucial nexus point in the dissemination of decentralized Alt-Right propaganda. The visual nature of social media has increased the importance of images a means of communication. Through this thesis, I analyze artifacts coming out of these spaces representing a conversation between creators and audiences, and how they work dialogically to introduce and reify symbols of white masculine supremacy within this subgroup. Through this process, I find multiple recurring patterns …


Master's Project: Framing Emotion In The Social Media Posts Of A Regional Sample Of National Park Sites, Sarah T. Raimondi Jan 2023

Master's Project: Framing Emotion In The Social Media Posts Of A Regional Sample Of National Park Sites, Sarah T. Raimondi

Rubenstein School Masters Project Publications

Public communication is one of the most important aspects of a natural resource manager’s job, and social media has opened new channels of communication between agencies and their audiences. Not only do most agencies now maintain an overall social media presence, but units within agencies typically create unique social media pages. This is true for the National Park Service (NPS) in the U.S., where over 400 individual parks have a social media presence. Many of these use Facebook for social media communication; Facebook is currently the largest social media platform, with over 2.8 billion monthly users. Drawing from prior research …


Marketing Ploy Or Mental Health Crisis? An Analysis Of Fan Responses To Celebrity Narratives, Kayla M. Ostrander Jan 2023

Marketing Ploy Or Mental Health Crisis? An Analysis Of Fan Responses To Celebrity Narratives, Kayla M. Ostrander

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Recently, celebrities have become more candid with their narratives than ever before through use of their social media accounts. While most celebrities use their social media accounts for purposes such as showing a positive or unknown side of them or to promote their work, others have posted narratives that have come under public criticism, especially Kanye ‘Ye’ West with his recent antisemitic-themed posts. In my study I examine what Kanye’s fans and the public believes to be his motivation for his recent narratives in October 2022 and December 2022, and their reasoning for assigning these motives. I collected a total …