Browsing by Subject "rhetoric"
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Item A Critical Analysis of Menstrual Health Websites in Relation to the Needs of Pre- and Early Post-Menarcheal Girls(2017-12) Sutherland Lembcke, AmyFifty-two percent of teens aged 13-17 go online to find sexual and reproductive health-related information, with internet usage among teen girls growing five times faster than any other demographic. This paper examines how credible and relatable menstrual health websites are to the needs of pre- and newly post-menarcheal girls. While it is shown that 54 percent of the online menstrual health content in my sample is well-rounded and balanced, only 15 percent of it is relatable to a teen audience. Furthermore, over 95 percent of the websites in my search used negative language when discussing menstrual healthItem Critical Community Literacy: Looking With Local Resistance(2018-05) Puett, SarahThis dissertation considers the relationship between literacy and activism in the public sphere. In the fall of 2016 I participated with a local racial justice organization where I took part in a series of public meetings. Focused on alternative means of public safety, the meetings were planned in response to local state violence—multiple incidents of police shooting and killing Black community members—as well as the broader interlocking systems of oppression which fail to protect people of color. This study exhibits how one decentralized organization helps establish critical literacy in a segregated urban area, better known for its progressive politics than its proclivity for lethal state violence. These meetings warrant a more complex, critical frame than community literacy scholarship currently provides. Drawing on both literacy and rhetorical studies, my analysis reveals the ways in which literacy events represent a type of intervention, and in this case, serve to disrupt mythic timelines. During the events, I contend, local Black organizers occupy and transgress the role of a literacy sponsor by calling on their (kn)own experiences with racial oppression. My analysis nuances the relationship between literacy events and practices, and in turn, I offer a series of dialectics for participant-observation in community literacy studies. I hope to establish precedent for speaking more plainly about racism and whiteness in community literacy scholarship, and to challenge the dominant notion that community literacy projects are categorically just. Looking With Local Resistance signals that if we participate as activists in communities outside the academy, we must do so as reflexively and sustainably as we do critically.Item Darwin, Huxley, and the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Science(2016-09) Wright, JeffreyThe interactions between Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley are widely misunderstood. Huxley neither rejected Darwin’s core ideas nor accepted them uncritically; instead, each scientist strongly influenced the other over a period of several decades. Fully understanding their debate requires understanding the rhetoric of the time, which leads to a realization that nineteenth-century scientists were familiar with a rhetoric of science that addresses many of the same issues that the discipline does today. The rhetorician Benjamin Humphrey Smart, although almost forgotten today, was highly influential not only on Darwin, but on the physicist Michael Faraday and the philosopher of science John Stuart Mill. His ideas set much of the background for the debate.Item Engaging the Right's Rhetoric of Dissent": New Directions for "Political Criticism""(2021-07) Doshi, AbhayThis dissertation examines the various rhetorical strategies through which thinkers on the political Right present themselves not as defenders of the status quo, but rather, as rebels; that is, as spokespersons of a counter-narrative, offered in opposition to the established dominant wisdom. In this manner, thinkers on the Right adopt what I call a “rhetoric of dissent,” presenting themselves as the “genuine” representatives of a marginalized position, and as such, as the allies of victims, and the enemies of the “elite.” The chief concern of this project is to consider the implications of this rhetoric of dissent for what, following Terry Eagleton, I call “political criticism.” Political criticism examines how, in Frank Lentricchia’s terms, “the expressive mechanisms of culture” build consensus for and against certain political positions. Accordingly, this project argues that scholars invested in political criticism must take this rhetoric of dissent seriously, for it has substantial effects on contemporary culture and political discourse. Furthermore, this project questions the underlying theoretical framework that ought to inform political criticism. Scholars in the discipline have become accustomed to viewing “truth” as something that is necessarily inaccessible, remaining content instead to limit themselves to the confines of “discourse.” Moreover, various thinkers have equated such a theoretical orientation, that Stanley Fish broadly characterizes as “anti-foundationalism,” with the critique of oppressive political projects, for it ostensibly undermines the claims to objectivity and universalism on which such oppressive projects depend. The rhetoric of dissent, which seeks to confound our understanding of protagonist and antagonist, I argue, reveals the limitation of such anti-foundationalist approaches. As an alternative, I suggest that political criticism may instead take its cue from the traditions of left-Hegelian dialectical thought that retain some of the important insight of antifoundationalism, while also successfully evading the latter’s pitfalls. In this manner, my project takes the rhetoric of the Right as its point of departure and begins to envision new directions for political criticism.Item Ethos as Dwelling: The Construction of Corporate Ethos in an IPO(2016-08) LI, SHUWENThis qualitative case study investigates how trust was operationalized in the Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba, in its U.S. Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2014. Rhetorically speaking, gaining trust is a result of a successful construction of ethos. Tracing the classical and contemporary conceptualizations of ethos, I drew a conclusion supporting ethos as dwelling and proposed to investigate this conceptualization in new contexts, such as IPOs. Using Robert Stake’s (1994) case-study methodology, I analyzed two artifacts in the Alibaba IPO: (1) the online tertiary audience reactions, which include English and Chinese online business news media reactions and high status actors; (2) Alibaba’s IPO prospectus, constituting a total of eight versions. “Thick description” and rhetorical interpretations were applied to data analysis. In addition to the main analytical tool, rhetorical ethos, I used theories from regional rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and technical communication to facilitate my data analysis. Findings from the analysis of the online tertiary audience reactions indicate how ecologies, consisted of material experiences and public feelings influence the construction of ethos. Outcomes from examining the IPO prospectus reveal the dialectic relationship between discourse and materiality in ethos construction. Results from the two artifacts overlap in the importance of materiality and the role of emotion in ethos construction. Though this study aims for naturalistic generalization, results can still contribute to refining existing theories of ethos, especially in a cross-cultural context and in professional communication.Item "Protecting" our works - from what?(Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) Sims, Nancy A.Academic library workers can be even stronger partners with academic creators by developing fluency in the many different ways copyright, intellectual property, and credit are discussed both within and outside the academy. This chapter explores one focus of that rhetoric: protection.Item The Rhetorical Dimensions of Citizenship: Undocumented Immigrants Defining Their Identity and Place in the “Nation of Immigrants”(2018-06) Trifonov, SvilenThe idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants has been a focal point of citizenship and immigration discourses in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. At the same time, unauthorized migration became a political concern in the nation-state’s regime of governmentality. The regime defined the terms of admission, concurrently producing the conditions of illegality, ascribing them to those deemed unwanted and unwelcome, the ever-so-popular “illegal aliens.” As the political regime continues to increase its efforts to place rhetorical and material borders around what is perceived as “American,” citizenship has become an increasingly contested term. In this dissertation, I examine the rhetorical efforts of undocumented immigrants and their allies to protest the dominant discursive regime of illegality. The dissertation posits that the mythic framework of “nation of immigrants” has come to define the different ways in which citizenship and belonging are understood in the United States. Through examinations of speeches by immigrant rights activists, the three case studies of the dissertation present several ways in which undocumented immigrants and their allies approach the concept of citizenship. My examination reveals how some activists strategically appeal for marginal inclusion through documentation; other activists demand a path to citizenship as a strategy for inclusion; yet others rely on decolonializing rhetorics that seek to redefine cultural and formal citizenship in the United States. The three contrasting strategies illustrate the complexity of immigrant rights activism in the early 21st century, showcasing how undocumented immigrants unmask, challenge, reconfigure, but also sometimes reaffirm, the powers of the nation-state to determine the norms of citizenship. In its entirety, the project advances our understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of citizenship and offers insights into how the coalition building efforts of immigrants are often limited by their contrasting and competing visions of inclusion and membership in a national community.Item To Think Like An Agroecologist: The Greenhorns And New Agrarian Rhetoric(2023-08) Geier Olive, GraceThe concept of agrarianism has a deep history in the United States. Beginning withThomas Jefferson’s vision of an ideal society comprised of yeoman farmer citizens, agrarianism’s implications and uses have evolved over time. Initially an ideology of U.S. American settler colonialism, agrarianism was taken up in later decades by farmers themselves in social movements. In recent decades, agrarian ideology has taken another turn towards agricultural sustainability in what scholars and activists call “new” agrarianism. New agrarianism is concerned with the wellbeing of the entire living system and has shifted towards an ideology that anyone can apply to their lives. Capturing the character and significance of the discursive transformation of agrarianism is an open scholarly project that this dissertation aims to join. I examine how one social movement organization, the Greenhorns, enters into this discourse and uses agrarianism in their efforts to support the movement for sustainable agriculture and changes the nature of agrarian discourse. Through a rhetorical analysis of a variety of their materials, I analyze how agrarianism figures in the Greenhorns’ recruitment, education, and maintenance. My assessment of these materials reveals that agrarian ideology functions as a central discourse as they recruit people and support a broader movement for sustainable agriculture, educate potential recruits to cultivate an activist agrarian farmer, and maintain the social movement they support by harnessing communication as a resource and stewarding an agrarian rhetorical ecology. Despite drawbacks such as the complexities of relying on an ideology with a brutal history and the difficulty of addressing multiple audiences, the Greenhorns’ use of agrarianism demonstrates the utility of the concept in movements that aim to ameliorate environmental degradation. In addition to furthering academic understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of new agrarianism, this dissertation advances understandings of various threads of scholarship in environmental communication and social movement rhetoric.Item Trope of Containment: Shale Oil, Risk Rhetoric, and the Lac-Mégantic Disaster(2019-08) Angelich, ChristianMy fieldwork was located in Lac-Mégantic, Québec, where a train carrying Bakken shale oil derailed on July 6, 2013 causing a pool fire that killed 47 people. The evacuation of 2,000 residents was a catalyst for public discourse on hazmat-by-rail in North America. This study combines participant observation and oral history with a critical examination of rhetoric used in response to shale oil transportation, neoliberal capitalism, environmental justice, and discourses on sustainability. There have been 26 hazmat derailments since 2013, which occurred despite regulatory fixes, and demonstrate what I call a trope of containment. When rail accidents happen, public safety knowledge is strategically contained to myopic risk frames that benefit industry. My hope is that survivor stories can offer oppositional narratives to the transportation of hydrocarbons along a rail network that sustains itself through regulatory capture. This project also examines relationships between fracking, climate change, and violence created by the production of fossil fuels. My goal is to demonstrate the failures that occur when containment strategies are institutionalized as a safety-based ideology. Secondly, critical pedagogical opportunities exist through an unmasking of rhetoric used to sustain a carbon economy, which works to delay alternative energy solutions to global warming. Included are research opportunities that can fill policy voids left by states with limited funds linking public safety to community education.Item Visualizing Ancient Greek Rhetoric in Immersive Virtual Reality(2012-06-13) Kim, Kyungyoon; Jackson, Bret; Thorson, Lauren; Graff, Richard; Rabbani, Azadeh; Johnstone, Christopher L.; Keefe, Daniel F.The goal of this project is to reconstruct ancient Greek rhetorical sites in virtual environments, including simulating architecture, sound, crowds, to better understand how the physical settings structured and constrained the interactions that took place in them. Our work makes use of the large-format, head-tracked stereoscopic display at MSI, and our preliminary results include an immersive visualization of the Thersilion at Megalopolis, a site where speeches were once given to 10,000 people.