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Title: New ways of seeing : survivor rhetoric and (re)writing stories of human trafficking
Creator: Gagnon, John T., II
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "New Ways of Seeing: Survivor Rhetoric and (Re)Writing Stories of Human Trafficking, listens to the ways survivors of human trafficking tell their stories and applies their reflections to problematize culturally situated discourses around the issue. Employing a methodology of care and situated within a cultural rhetorics paradigm, this project draws from decolonial, feminist, and indigenous theories to demonstrate how mainstream conversations around human trafficking have been framed in the...
Show more"New Ways of Seeing: Survivor Rhetoric and (Re)Writing Stories of Human Trafficking, listens to the ways survivors of human trafficking tell their stories and applies their reflections to problematize culturally situated discourses around the issue. Employing a methodology of care and situated within a cultural rhetorics paradigm, this project draws from decolonial, feminist, and indigenous theories to demonstrate how mainstream conversations around human trafficking have been framed in the discourse of globality, thereby rendering us less capable of hearing the voices of those most impacted. I explore how participants' storytelling practices reveal multi-layered rhetorics of recognition that push against the pervasive tendency of abstractifying discourses around the issue of human trafficking. I further demonstrate how the participants engage in a negotiation between the articulation of self and the use of the rhetorical frames of dominant human trafficking narratives to both encounter and confront colonizing language, while subversively using that same language to connect with the external. The project illuminates potential paths forward for a paradigmatic shift away from the globalized, colonizing rhetoric that has to-date defined human rights issues." -- Abstract.
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Title: Sharing stories, making space : relational literacy and Korean American adoptee rhetorics
Creator: Firestone, Katlyn
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation uses a cultural rhetorics methodology of story and relationality to examine the role of racial isolation in the leadership practices of Korean American adoptee community leaders. While scholarship in Writing and Rhetoric has used story and relationality to critique the historical erasure of racially marginalized peoples, the discipline has yet to do so from the specific perspective of transnational transracial adoptees. That transnational transracial adoptees are...
Show moreThis dissertation uses a cultural rhetorics methodology of story and relationality to examine the role of racial isolation in the leadership practices of Korean American adoptee community leaders. While scholarship in Writing and Rhetoric has used story and relationality to critique the historical erasure of racially marginalized peoples, the discipline has yet to do so from the specific perspective of transnational transracial adoptees. That transnational transracial adoptees are overwhelmingly adopted into predominantly White homes and communities and must thus develop their racial (person of color) and cultural (White American) identities separately uniquely positions them to further nuance discussions of race and racial literacy. In this study, I interviewed four past and present leaders of an adult Korean American adoptee organization in the Midwest. A theoretical framework of relational literacy both emerged from and guided my analyses of their stories and yielded three key findings about racial isolation: (1) racial isolation can occur among people of the same race/positionality; (2) disorientation can occur in the initial stages of intentionally building relationships with other adoptees as a result of racial isolation; and (3) racial isolation is not only a matter of physical environment but also of ever-shifting emotional, intellectual, and spiritual states.These insights suggest that Korean American adoptees' leadership practices of facilitating relationships (between adoptees, Korean culture, Korea, critical histories of adoption, Asian Americans), establishing safe spaces for programming, revising essentialized racial and ethnic categories (i.e., "Korean American" and "Asian American"), facilitating relationships between their and other adoptee organizations, and cultivating the next generation of adoptee community leaders are contingent on adoptee leaders' own experiences with racial isolation. Moreover, analysis shows that adoptee leaders' own experiences with racial isolation also inform what and how they design and implement programming for membership. The final chapter identifies how a framework of relational literacy can be widely applied in Writing and Rhetoric scholarship, as well as its contributions to the fields of Asian American rhetoric, cultural rhetorics, and adoption studies.
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Title: Institutionalization of digital literacies in four-year Liberal Arts institutions
Creator: Wendt, Mary Ellen
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Few in the field of Rhetoric and Writing debate digital literacy's value in higher level institutions today, yet while faculty in general echo this same value, the actual institutionalization of digital literacy--especially in liberal arts institutions--stands in question. This dissertation project, situated in the field of digital rhetoric and positioned theoretically with postmodern constructs, approaches research in digital literacy issues and "institutionalizing" digital literacy. I...
Show moreFew in the field of Rhetoric and Writing debate digital literacy's value in higher level institutions today, yet while faculty in general echo this same value, the actual institutionalization of digital literacy--especially in liberal arts institutions--stands in question. This dissertation project, situated in the field of digital rhetoric and positioned theoretically with postmodern constructs, approaches research in digital literacy issues and "institutionalizing" digital literacy. I examine findings using activity theory and genre theory to construct a model of the Operational Life Cycle of the Institutionalization of Digital Literacy. This model of the Operational Life Cycle has several purposes: it visually can enable others to navigate the murky journey of institutionalization; it provides a clear framework for understanding the complexities of institutional work; and it demonstrates the possibility that any size school, even with limited funds, can institutionalize digital literacy. This kind of model illuminates two ideas: One, the power of the centrifugal and centripetal outcomes (genres) of the activities in the Life Cycle, which can perpetuate and speed along such institutionalization. Two, such institutionalization requires the participation of the institution at large, English departments more specifically, and faculty members as individuals. Without such participation, holes in the Life Cycle render institutionalization of digital literacy much more difficult a challenge.
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Title: What it do? : Houston hip hop, ciphers, migration, and borderlands
Creator: Del Hierro, Victor
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this dissertation, I migrate through Houston Hip Hop culture from 1991-2000 to understand the history and legacy of DJ Screw, Screw Tapes, and Screw and Chopped style. The purpose of this project is to understand the relationship between local communities and the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) by migrating through the borderland spaces that exists both physically and metaphorically. Using Hip Hop practices and knowledges, this dissertation understands Hip Hop as a culture made up of multiple...
Show moreIn this dissertation, I migrate through Houston Hip Hop culture from 1991-2000 to understand the history and legacy of DJ Screw, Screw Tapes, and Screw and Chopped style. The purpose of this project is to understand the relationship between local communities and the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) by migrating through the borderland spaces that exists both physically and metaphorically. Using Hip Hop practices and knowledges, this dissertation understands Hip Hop as a culture made up of multiple Hip Hop Ciphers. Locating borderlands between ciphers by purposefully migrating between them, this study combines the analysis of mixtapes, archival material, and interviews, this project works to create an emic view of Hip Hop as a culture that has always, and continues to create, re-imagine, and sustain knowledge and history through technological innovation, writing, and community building. This dissertation focuses on Houston because of DJ Screw and his development of a style (Screwed and Chopped) and mixtape series (Screw Tapes) that continues to impact and define a community’s identity. Through Screw Tapes, DJ Screw and the Houston Hip Hop community negotiation the relationship between Hip Hop and local styles in the production of diverse forms of communication.
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Title: Bridging culture and affect : rhetorical practices with(in) a digitized archive
Creator: Bratta, Phillip
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Bridging Culture and Affect: Rhetorical Practices with(in) a Digitized Archive offers a theoretical framework to understanding culture and affect in both digital and non-digital engagement. Many scholars typically take a semiotic approach to understand and interpret cultural texts and events. They, however, often neglect the importance of affect in cultural production, consumption, and meaning. In affect theory, many theorists argue that affect is an ineffable, non-representational, and...
Show moreBridging Culture and Affect: Rhetorical Practices with(in) a Digitized Archive offers a theoretical framework to understanding culture and affect in both digital and non-digital engagement. Many scholars typically take a semiotic approach to understand and interpret cultural texts and events. They, however, often neglect the importance of affect in cultural production, consumption, and meaning. In affect theory, many theorists argue that affect is an ineffable, non-representational, and acultural phenomenon. Yet these theorists fail to account for the role of cultural meanings that produce affect. As such, I argue that rhetorical thinking and practice can activate what I call cultural affect—a rhetorical event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences emerge through intensities that orient a set of relations and meanings. As a practice, then, cultural affect involves not merely reading and then writing about people, texts, objects, and things, but attending to one’s cultural background and affective experience during research and analyses.To show cultural affect in action, I use a mixed-methods approach—story, interviews, and multi-sensuous rhetorical analyses—to explore a set of labor union political posters in the Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections archive at the University of Michigan. After discussing the digitized versions of the posters, I examine three posters created by the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. My findings show the relationships between embodiment, texts, and language. More specifically, they bring to the surface the labor of writing and the practice of connecting reflections and cultural histories. The findings push us to make tighter connections between embodiment and language, emphasize the value in multimodality and diverse writing styles, initiate ethical practices, and identify the affordances and limitations of digitizing texts.
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Title: Individual copycats : memetics, identity and collaboration in the "World of Warcraft"
Creator: Alexander, Phillip Michael
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation uses the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) World of Warcraft as a location for inquiry into how players learn to collaborate, forge identities, and achieve both personal and group goals. [The author focuses] specifically on a memetics based framework, looking at how memes operate within WoW while paying careful attention to what gamers do to develop individual and group identities in light of so many things in the game being memetic. The study focuses around two...
Show moreThis dissertation uses the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) World of Warcraft as a location for inquiry into how players learn to collaborate, forge identities, and achieve both personal and group goals. [The author focuses] specifically on a memetics based framework, looking at how memes operate within WoW while paying careful attention to what gamers do to develop individual and group identities in light of so many things in the game being memetic. The study focuses around two guiding principles: there's a lot of modeling and copying/replicating happening in WoW , but gamers still work to build individual and group identities that represent something unique.--Abstract.
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Title: The rhetorical making of the Asian/Asian American face : reading and writing Asian eyelids
Creator: Sano-Franchini, Jennifer Lee
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Drawing on scholarship in and around rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian American rhetoric, cultural studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory alongside qualitative data analysis of approximately fifty videos and the numerous viewer comments that accompany them, this study is a rhetorical analysis of the discourse on East Asian blepharoplasty in online video."--Abstract.

Title: Dancing without bodies : pedagogy and performance in digital spaces
Creator: Ghosh, Shreelina
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The practice of teaching in an online composition class eliminates the visibility and immediacy the teacher and interpersonal interactivity in a classroom community. This may be problematic for effective online learning. The problem that online instructors might face is one that some traditional Odissi dance teachers also experience. In order to explore the conflict between tradition and mediations with technology, this study focuses on Odissi, an Indian classical dance and examines how...
Show moreThe practice of teaching in an online composition class eliminates the visibility and immediacy the teacher and interpersonal interactivity in a classroom community. This may be problematic for effective online learning. The problem that online instructors might face is one that some traditional Odissi dance teachers also experience. In order to explore the conflict between tradition and mediations with technology, this study focuses on Odissi, an Indian classical dance and examines how digital technologies of teaching, like CDs, DVD, online videos and synchronous videos are transforming the practice and teaching of this traditional dance. Surveys, interviews and qualitative research of the field of Odissi dance revealed that technologizing the dance might be unavoidable; but to some practitioners it may be disrupting Odissi's traditional values. In my own composition pedagogy, I find that simulating the traditional learning experiences in an online classroom can be helpful in enhancing the learning and teaching experience in an online composition classroom. My research reasserts the position of the teacher in an online pedagogic space and argues that the presence or simulated presence of bodies might be vital in learning and composing collaboratively. These findings have implications for composition pedagogy and computers and composition because it demonstrates the complicated relationship between traditional and online teaching, revealing the impact of mediation on these pedagogic practices.
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Title: Responding to sexual violence through care-based practices in writing programs
Creator: Brentnell, Lauren Carroll
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In Responding to Sexual Violence Through Care-Based Practices in Writing Programs, I articulate a trauma-informed, care-based (TI/CB) approach to writing program administration. Through an analysis of the First-Year Writing Program at Michigan State University, I argue that the incorporation of TI/CB methods in writing programs-and writing studies more broadly-can help shape ethical and informed responses to sexual violence. I suggest that a TI/CB framework is applicable not only as a...
Show moreIn Responding to Sexual Violence Through Care-Based Practices in Writing Programs, I articulate a trauma-informed, care-based (TI/CB) approach to writing program administration. Through an analysis of the First-Year Writing Program at Michigan State University, I argue that the incorporation of TI/CB methods in writing programs-and writing studies more broadly-can help shape ethical and informed responses to sexual violence. I suggest that a TI/CB framework is applicable not only as a response to crises once they become public, but also to address the already existing culture of sexual violence at every university.As I consider the intersection of writing program administration (WPA) work and institutional and personal trauma, I also use a TI/CB orientation to form both an analytic heuristic and a methodological framework. The practices that make up this framework are: promoting empathetic listening (Laub); building safe and open communities (Herman); encouraging storytelling (Pennebaker); reflecting on positionality and relationality (Powell et al.); rebuilding networks of trust and care (Morales); and centering survivors (Goodman and Epstein). Throughout the study, I consider how these practices already connect to the articulation of writing program values expressed by WPAs at Michigan State University.In addition to this analysis, I provide recommendations for the incorporation of TI/CB practices in both writing programs and writing studies as a field. This includes the development of self-assessment surveys for writing program administrators rooted in TI/CB values. In addition, I consider how a TI/CB framework could be adapted to create research methodologies rooted in trauma-informed care. Finally, I suggest that because of the unique position of WPAs between university administrators, teachers, and students, an enhancement of administrative practices through TI/CB methods could help form more ethical responses to campus sexual violence.
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Title: Composing in public
Creator: Heintz, Anne
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The central premise of this project is that researching student communication and composing actions in light of audience will illuminate particular features of student composing processes in 21st century interdisciplinary contexts. Students in this study took part in a six week inquiry unit about their local area. Data generated included student interviews and collection of student work. Data analysis used themes from the organizing frame for research, audience theory, along with emergent...
Show moreThe central premise of this project is that researching student communication and composing actions in light of audience will illuminate particular features of student composing processes in 21st century interdisciplinary contexts. Students in this study took part in a six week inquiry unit about their local area. Data generated included student interviews and collection of student work. Data analysis used themes from the organizing frame for research, audience theory, along with emergent categories to determine patterns of student action. This study discovered that during networked composing an enduring audience of peers influences how students draw upon their personal experiences, interact with and address an audience of peers, and imagine and interact with distant audiences. This study demonstrates how educational drama, which also takes place within an enduring audience of peers, is a tool that can be used to demonstrate effective principles of composing in light of 21st century audience needs.
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Title: Crafting place : rhetorical practices of the everyday
Creator: Brooks-Gillies, Marilee
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Crafting Place: Rhetorical Practices of the Everyday explores how everyday rhetorical practices contribute to place- and space-making that enable us negotiate and form identities as well as develop professional skills. The theoretical framework I build is based upon a qualitative research study of a crafting group, The Crafty Beavers, whose members are graduate students. The methods used in the study include oral history interviews and participant-observation of group...
Show moreCrafting Place: Rhetorical Practices of the Everyday explores how everyday rhetorical practices contribute to place- and space-making that enable us negotiate and form identities as well as develop professional skills. The theoretical framework I build is based upon a qualitative research study of a crafting group, The Crafty Beavers, whose members are graduate students. The methods used in the study include oral history interviews and participant-observation of group meetings. By listening to the stories from The Crafty Beavers, I hear their stories as theories and use them as the primary framework for the dissertation project. Their theories draw attention to how practice informs place and place informs practice, especially focusing on the practices of making social spaces when negotiating and adapting to academic places. The everyday practices within the group are carried from spaces of the group and spaces of home into professional spaces of participants' graduate studies. Through these stories and experiences, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying space and place as simultaneously rhetorical, cultural, social, and physical that emphasizes the importance of everyday practice in the making of meaning and the making of space and place. This framework includes five key arguments 1) Space is fluid and relational and exists within and/or alongside place, 2) Place is more stable than space and is given meaning through artifact, language, and practice, 3) Spaces are made to change, adapt, and manipulate places, 4) Space and place are performed in multiple ways simultaneously, and 5) Space and place are mobilized through everyday cultural practices. Ultimately, these stories are about rhetoric and power and indicate a need for increased attention to how everyday practices and places inform professional practices and places.
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Title: Who are "users"? : representations of difference in usability and user experience blogs
Creator: Zantjer, Rebecca
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This thesis reports the results of an empirical study that classifies the rhetorical moves used to talk about diverse users in industry facing usability/user experience blogs. It argues that the metaphors used to talk about difference construct a normalized user that systematically excludes diverse users from the design process and results in technologies that contribute to oppressive systems of power and privilege. The thesis presents an alternative rhetorical construction of diverse users...
Show moreThis thesis reports the results of an empirical study that classifies the rhetorical moves used to talk about diverse users in industry facing usability/user experience blogs. It argues that the metaphors used to talk about difference construct a normalized user that systematically excludes diverse users from the design process and results in technologies that contribute to oppressive systems of power and privilege. The thesis presents an alternative rhetorical construction of diverse users and offers suggestions to promote inclusivity in usability/user experience research, teaching, and practice.
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Title: Inventing computational rhetoric
Creator: Wojcik, Michael W.
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Many disciplines in the humanities are developing "computational" branches which make use of information technology to process large amounts of data algorithmically. The field of computational rhetoric is in its infancy, but we are already seeing interesting results from applying the ideas and goals of rhetoric to text processing and related areas. After considering what computational rhetoric might be, three approaches to inventing computational rhetorics are presented: a structural schema,...
Show moreMany disciplines in the humanities are developing "computational" branches which make use of information technology to process large amounts of data algorithmically. The field of computational rhetoric is in its infancy, but we are already seeing interesting results from applying the ideas and goals of rhetoric to text processing and related areas. After considering what computational rhetoric might be, three approaches to inventing computational rhetorics are presented: a structural schema, a review of extant work, and a theoretical exploration.
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Title: Through working closets : examining rhetorical and narrative approaches to building LGBTQ & professional identity inside a corporate workplace
Creator: Cox, Matthew Byron
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Through Working Closets: Examining Rhetorics of LGBTQ Professional Identities Inside a Corporate Workplace is itself a story about how rhetorical practices (such as storytelling) help us negotiate and form identity(ies). I call for a new understanding of identity-building practices in the workplace. This research is a qualitative study based in interviews and site visits around one major Fortune 500 American discount-retail corporation. I introduce the concept of Show moreThrough Working Closets: Examining Rhetorics of LGBTQ Professional Identities Inside a Corporate Workplace is itself a story about how rhetorical practices (such as storytelling) help us negotiate and form identity(ies). I call for a new understanding of identity-building practices in the workplace. This research is a qualitative study based in interviews and site visits around one major Fortune 500 American discount-retail corporation. I introduce the concept of Working Closets, which my participants and I show through stories and experiences to be spaces, risks, situations, and relationships negotiated through moments of closetedness and outness. This challenges and dismantles the notion of "the closet" as a singular space one is either in or out. This work is an example of a cultural rhetorics approach interrogating professional identity building practices and the reconciling of that with personal/non-professional identity. Ultimately, these stories are about rhetoric and power. I seek to theorize about who gets to define "professional" and when and where. How do LGBTQ professionals survive or even succeed in heteronormative or hostile workplaces? How do LGBTQ persons challenge or work around the moments when their identities are covered over or contested? My participants' data speaks to these situations and tells the stories around them. Through threads of both commonality and difference, my participants build a conversation around the contemporary LGBTQ professional and the issues confronting them. Both the American and the global workplaces are increasingly destabilized and diverse, as are notions of LGBTQ identity and the lived experiences of LGBTQ lives.
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Title: Five Malcolms, one archive : Columbia University's Malcolm X Project and a history of narrative co-optation
Creator: Schraufnagle, Doug
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: February 21, 2011 marked the 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Despite an almost incomprehensible amount of cross-disciplinary scholarship designed to analyze the monumental impact of the slain leader, recent work by Dr. Manning Marable suggests that it is actually only now, in the twenty-first century, that we can begin to conduct an honest assessment. The cause: a combination of critical and discursive narrative interventions on behalf of stakeholders vying for control...
Show moreFebruary 21, 2011 marked the 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Despite an almost incomprehensible amount of cross-disciplinary scholarship designed to analyze the monumental impact of the slain leader, recent work by Dr. Manning Marable suggests that it is actually only now, in the twenty-first century, that we can begin to conduct an honest assessment. The cause: a combination of critical and discursive narrative interventions on behalf of stakeholders vying for control over Malcolm X's legacy. In this thesis, I theorize deeply entrenched narrative constructions of Malcolm X through Dr. Marable's Malcolm X Project (a digital archive housed at Columbia University). As I argue throughout, the rhetorical power of co-opting narrative accounts of the life and legacy of Malcolm X holds the power to directly impact the public's perception of American race relations. This thesis is a thought experiment geared toward two primary goals: 1) marking the multiple "Malcolms" in discursive practices manifested in material objects such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and 2) theorizing the relationships between them. What I want people to see in this exploration is what it was that changed me, and how interacting with multiple narrative constructions of Malcolm X produces radically different realities; multiplicitous stories of contemporary America that all seem to exist at the same time, antagonistically woven together. As such, this thesis is a collection of essays ruminating on the power of collective memory and its roles in making the present -- as well as the future.
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Title: Church and tower : graduate student negotiations of faith and learning communities
Creator: Espinoza, Hannah Brady
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This project is a practice in telling a small part of a less common story: one about negotiating commitments to academic and church communities when the stories told across those communities don't always line up or are incomplete. Through the stories of my three participants as well as my own experiences, I will describe this in-between space and the individual negotiations we perform to explain those spaces to ourselves and to rest in them. In telling these stories from the in-between places...
Show moreThis project is a practice in telling a small part of a less common story: one about negotiating commitments to academic and church communities when the stories told across those communities don't always line up or are incomplete. Through the stories of my three participants as well as my own experiences, I will describe this in-between space and the individual negotiations we perform to explain those spaces to ourselves and to rest in them. In telling these stories from the in-between places, I use cultural rhetorics to permeate boundaries some scholars continue to hold between academic and community learning. Through the stories of participants and myself, I demonstrate that holding, challenging, and shifting community rhetorics is a complex process of critical thought and individual experience that carries religious rhetorics into the realm of belief and practice and beyond.Using methodologies and mixed methods from cultural rhetorics, Indigenous rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, and grounded theory, I emphasize practices of relationality, listening, and storying to share stories from three participants who participated in an Evangelical church community, pseudonymized here as "Hope Church," while completing graduate studies. Through a thorough exploration of these stories as well as my own, this study finds that individual negotiations of academic and Evangelical communities come out of and create a rhetorical space of faith and learning that allows them to hold multiple knowledges in constellation while shifting narratives across spaces.
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Title: Mobile user experience research methods & context of use : a systematic literature review
Creator: Ismirle, Jennifer
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: With the rapid growth and development of mobile technologies, there is a need for examination of current mobile UX research to understand whether the methods being used have or are evolving (e.g., into the wild) and how mobile context of use may be considered for these types of studies. This thesis describes a systematic literature review to understand the types of methods, evaluation settings, procedures, focuses, study designs, tools, and context considerations used for mobile UX research....
Show moreWith the rapid growth and development of mobile technologies, there is a need for examination of current mobile UX research to understand whether the methods being used have or are evolving (e.g., into the wild) and how mobile context of use may be considered for these types of studies. This thesis describes a systematic literature review to understand the types of methods, evaluation settings, procedures, focuses, study designs, tools, and context considerations used for mobile UX research. Overall, the results indicate a further push into the “wild” or field settings and a broadening of UX mobile research and contextual considerations through the use of more open and less restrictive methods, conducting research in dynamic environments of use over semi-longitudinal time periods, and the use of a range of methods and tools based on the goals and context of each study to allow for greater understanding of impacts and performance. However, further research and consideration are needed for the inclusion of a broader range of experiences and user or social contexts to continue to understand and meet the needs of humans and their ever-expanding and evolving technological ecosystems.
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Title: "Take action in the world!" : advocacy and reciprocity as research practices in technical communication
Creator: Turner, Heather Noel
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines how scholars in technical and professional communication conduct research related to social justice. I define social justice research, then identify and visualize disciplinary activity related to social justice over a 10 year (2006-2016) time span. Using data visualizations and critical computations as a methodological heuristic, I present the practices of four scholars conducting social justice research to offer thematic data narratives. I found that scholars can...
Show moreThis dissertation examines how scholars in technical and professional communication conduct research related to social justice. I define social justice research, then identify and visualize disciplinary activity related to social justice over a 10 year (2006-2016) time span. Using data visualizations and critical computations as a methodological heuristic, I present the practices of four scholars conducting social justice research to offer thematic data narratives. I found that scholars can enact social justice when they intentionally integrate principles of advocacy and reciprocity across the arcs of their research processes. Advocacy occurs when researchers negotiate, accommodate and facilitate justice across research settings, throughout research processes, and with research partners. Reciprocity occurs when researchers structure opportunities to exchange knowledge, labor, and resources with participants and related peoples, communities, organizations, and nonprofits. The data from 960 conference presentations and four semi-structured interviews with technical communication researchers reveals that technical communication as a field has commitments to inclusion, public action, and increasing individual agency. Social justice researchers enact these commitments through their research processes, across research contexts, and with various research partners.
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Title: The business of feminism : rhetorics of identity in Youtube's beauty community
Creator: Ledbetter, Lehua
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Business of Feminism: Rhetorics of Identity in YouTube's Beauty Community seeks to understand an online community comprised of millions of women who watch and sometimes produce videos about makeup and fashion. I present case studies of two Asian-American women who describe their roles in building identity, community, and entrepreneurial enterprises in the community--actions that are as essential to their survivance and cultural sustainability as to their financial stability. I explore the...
Show moreThe Business of Feminism: Rhetorics of Identity in YouTube's Beauty Community seeks to understand an online community comprised of millions of women who watch and sometimes produce videos about makeup and fashion. I present case studies of two Asian-American women who describe their roles in building identity, community, and entrepreneurial enterprises in the community--actions that are as essential to their survivance and cultural sustainability as to their financial stability. I explore the tension between this community's highly commercial nature (its members, many of whom are entrepreneurs profiting from YouTube's Partner Program, often participate in dominant discourses of female gender performance and consumerism) and its uses for women of color as a space to use rhetorical moves to build for themselves and others positions of power and expertise. My theoretical framework for understanding this phenomenon draws from post-positivist realist theories of identity that account for the experiences of the women in the beauty community. I interrogate the uses of theories that espouse a fluid, postmodern/cyborg feminism for understanding this phenomenon; such theories assume identities that are largely inaccessible to women of color, who cannot escape their material, embodied, marked identities. Post-positivist realist theories afford an experience-based approach to identity that assumes that we can learn about the nature of power and conditions of oppression from the experiences of others. This orientation serves as the foundation for the way I understand and approach identity and feminism in this project. Data for this study consists of participants' transcribed YouTube videos and three rounds of interviews. Methods include a coding scheme that I developed for analysis of the videos, as well as interview scripts. The beauty community is a space in which feminist rhetorical practices occur alongside and intertwined with commercial and professional activity. Feminisms practiced in this community do not always align with the feminist theory of the academy. My findings therefore introduce a complicating narrative, to cyberfeminism in particular, and make visible a rhetoric of identity operating in this community that I believe can generate new work on digital identity. This work has implications for feminist as well professional writing studies in understanding of how minority women situate themselves in positions of power in online settings. In this community, commercial and identity- building activities are not mutually exclusive. They exist perpetually in tension with each other. I present data in which it is apparent that women use storytelling as a rhetorical move to construct their identities as gendered, raced minorities. I also argue that the women in the beauty community can be considered professional writers, whose work I refer to as technical communication in the vernacular. I offer implications of this study for understanding feminist rhetorical theory, cyberfeminism, and professional and technical writing studies.
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Title: Poetic composition in a digital age
Creator: Platt, Julie Rose
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explores the composing practices of contemporary American poets in the digital landscapes of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I attend to poets' production, publication, and distribution practices across networked spaces, looking at how these poets negotiate the shift from print to digital paradigms. This attention to poetry is focused on four working, active American poets: Geoffrey Gatza, Jessica Poli, Hannah Stephenson, and Johnathon Williams. The methods used in...
Show moreThis dissertation explores the composing practices of contemporary American poets in the digital landscapes of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I attend to poets' production, publication, and distribution practices across networked spaces, looking at how these poets negotiate the shift from print to digital paradigms. This attention to poetry is focused on four working, active American poets: Geoffrey Gatza, Jessica Poli, Hannah Stephenson, and Johnathon Williams. The methods used in this study include oral history interviews with said poets, and rhetorical analysis of a number of digital materials including issues of electronic poetry journals, blogged histories of digital publication, and videos of poets' writing processes. My analysis has led to numerous insights that illuminate the nature of producing, publishing, and distributing writing in a digital age: how rich, networked composing environments contrast with Romantic notions of poetic composition and poetic identity as solitary and austere; how digital and cooperative publication models complicate understandings of authorial legitimacy; and how poetry journals speak to changing demands on and demands of delivery in networked spaces.
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