Search results

Title: Toward a trauma-informed pedagogy
Creator: Blackburn, Lorelei
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Trauma-affected students are in our writing classrooms-whether or not they've self-disclosed, and whether or not we recognize them. If we refuse to acknowledge trauma or refuse to approach trauma as a pedagogical issue, we risk marginalizing these students by adhering to ableist pedagogies that dishonor differences in bodies, minds, and abilities. But when our pedagogies, our classrooms, and our faculty become trauma-informed, we can anticipate, embrace, and welcome the insights that trauma...
Show moreTrauma-affected students are in our writing classrooms-whether or not they've self-disclosed, and whether or not we recognize them. If we refuse to acknowledge trauma or refuse to approach trauma as a pedagogical issue, we risk marginalizing these students by adhering to ableist pedagogies that dishonor differences in bodies, minds, and abilities. But when our pedagogies, our classrooms, and our faculty become trauma-informed, we can anticipate, embrace, and welcome the insights that trauma and disability offer. As educators, we may be looking for solid and certain plans for working with trauma-affected and disabled students and for overcoming pedagogical hurdles. But, students, classes, trauma, disability, and issues of access are not standard or universalize-able. Working within a disability studies framework, this project considers how to make learning accessible for trauma-affected students by 1) analyzing composition pedagogy through the lens of disability, and 2) building on Stephanie Kerschbaum's concept of critically considering anecdotal relations of disability in composition classrooms to include trauma. The project suggests a turn toward uncertainty--acknowledging that we don't know, or need to know, everything--and listening to stories that welcome trauma and disability into the composition classroom to enable us to develop new relationships with trauma and cultivate trauma-awareness.I argue that relationality--building relationships with students based on respect for their lived experiences with trauma and violence, as well as respect for their differences in bodies, minds, and abilities, is inherent to a trauma-informed writing pedagogy. I further argue that we must work collaboratively with students to recast our understanding of trauma, negotiate access, and implement moves that make our writing classrooms accessible. Finally, I theorize and lay out a flexible framework for enacting a trauma-informed pedagogy to dismantle the ableism that persists in our classrooms and to begin establishing cultures of access and authentically support student success.
Show less

Title: Solidarity, safety, and online sovereignty : an inquiry into the social media sharing practices of indigenous and chicana women
Creator: Hutchinson, Leslie A.
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation contains a cultural, digital rhetorics inquiry into the social media sharing practices of Indigenous and Chicana women. Working alongside three women from her local community, I investigated how these women navigate concerns about online safety, intellectual property, and surveillance. To conduct my study, I integrated cultural rhetorics research methods into my research design, which informed how I collected data through hosting a talking circle and conducting follow-up...
Show moreThis dissertation contains a cultural, digital rhetorics inquiry into the social media sharing practices of Indigenous and Chicana women. Working alongside three women from her local community, I investigated how these women navigate concerns about online safety, intellectual property, and surveillance. To conduct my study, I integrated cultural rhetorics research methods into my research design, which informed how I collected data through hosting a talking circle and conducting follow-up interviews. Then, using grounded theory to analyze my data, I found that: 1) though these women experience various social oppressions within social media spaces, they find and create community to collectively act in resistance; and 2) the acts of resistance in which these women engage expand scholarly understandings of how social media platforms are designed to asymmetrically oppress users from marginalized backgrounds. Together, these findings dispel the myth that women-and particularly women of color-have had no stake in the development of online platforms. I argue, rather, that despite how these platforms are designed, women of color critically enact cultural sovereignty in online spaces through asserting their identities, fighting for political rights, and creating community in acts of not only resistance, but survivance.
Show less

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.
Show less

Title: Carrying culture : temporal and spatial constructions of Somalia among women in the diaspora
Creator: Nur Cooley, Suban Ahmed
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This project works to take a transnational Black feminist and cultural rhetorics approach to blend an interdisciplinary culmination of theories and concepts on the impact of migration and displacement on Somali women, their identity, and the carrying of culture. It is a multi-location geographic comparative study between Kenya, Italy, and Australia, investigating how Hamilton's "communities of consciousness" are manifested in the temporal and spatial constructions of Somalia displayed among...
Show moreThis project works to take a transnational Black feminist and cultural rhetorics approach to blend an interdisciplinary culmination of theories and concepts on the impact of migration and displacement on Somali women, their identity, and the carrying of culture. It is a multi-location geographic comparative study between Kenya, Italy, and Australia, investigating how Hamilton's "communities of consciousness" are manifested in the temporal and spatial constructions of Somalia displayed among women in the diaspora. As Hamilton expressed, "The geographical displacement of people is a complex social process not just a physical movement...[and] must be conceptualized as contributing to the definition of what people were, what they are, and what they may become" (emphasis orig. 397). Using the Somali diaspora as an example of a people who were, are, and are still becoming, this research works to empower and embolden the value and strength of women's knowledges in consistently supporting the continuation of varied cultural practices among the African Diaspora.The dissertation toggles between these central themes to answer two main questions: 1) How Somali culture and identity is rhetorically reconstructed among women in the diaspora, and 2) How practices of Somali culture manifest and become materialized in the physical spaces women in the diaspora construct in their homes.
Show less

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.
Show less

Title: "You must learn" : a critical language awareness approach towriting instruction for African American language-speaking students in composition courses
Creator: Hankerson, Shenika D.
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The writing of African American students from the African American Language (AAL)-speaking culture has primarily been identified as substandard (Applebee & Langer, 2006; Ball, 1996; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012; Rickford, 1999; Smitherman, 1994). While hegemonic language attitudes and practices have been pinpointed as a contributing factor for this identification (Ball & Lardner, 2005; Charity-Hudley & Mallinson, 2011; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Baugh, 1999), the...
Show more"The writing of African American students from the African American Language (AAL)-speaking culture has primarily been identified as substandard (Applebee & Langer, 2006; Ball, 1996; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012; Rickford, 1999; Smitherman, 1994). While hegemonic language attitudes and practices have been pinpointed as a contributing factor for this identification (Ball & Lardner, 2005; Charity-Hudley & Mallinson, 2011; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Baugh, 1999), the larger concern-how to teach writing in ways that lead toward favorable experiences and outcomes for AAL-speaking students remains inadequately addressed; especially in composition. This study aimed to address the preceding concerns by applying critical language awareness (CLA) pedagogy to the design of a series of instructional units which sought to improve AAL-speaking students' critical consciousness of language, writing, and society. The innovative series of instructional units employed African American-centered literature, novels, poetry, hip-hop, and new media in order to teach AAL-speaking students about language, linguistic variation, discourse, and power. To understand the possibilities and accessibility of the CLA approach to writing instruction, one composition instructor participated in a one-day critical language awareness teacher preparation program and subsequently implemented the series of instructional units with several AAL-speaking students in composition courses at a public, urban, research university over a six-week time span. Multiple types of qualitative data (oral, textual and visual) were collected in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the one-day critical language awareness teacher preparation program and the CLA approach to writing instruction. Analyses of essays, questionnaires, and classroom discussions reveal how the: (1) composition instructor was able to become more aware of the social and cultural contexts of AAL and more conscious of her own linguistic prejudices; thus providing the composition instructor with the tools to resocialize her hegemonic and oppressive dispositions toward language into pluralistic and emancipatory dispositions toward language, and (2) AAL-speaking were able to become more aware of writing processes and practices and more conscious of their own writer's identity; thus providing the AAL-speaking students with the tools to work critically within and across a variety of languages, including AAL, mainstream language, and code-meshing language, and enhance their writing in several areas, including ideas, voice, language facility, and conventions. Overall, this study highlights the possibilities (and challenges) of fashioning CLA pedagogy into accessible and relevant writing curricula for culturally and linguistically diverse students."--Pages ii-iii.
Show less

Title: Constellating cultural rhetorics, first year writing, and service-learning : a story of teaching and learning
Creator: Prielipp, Sarah E.
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the relationships among cultural rhetorics theory and methods, first year writing, and service-learning by showing the ways these theories and pedagogies constellate, or build, new things from their intersections and relationality. The author argues that “story is theory is practice” and demonstrates how this can work in first year writing through a cultural rhetorics-informed service-learning pedagogy. The author explains that this story of teaching and learning –...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the relationships among cultural rhetorics theory and methods, first year writing, and service-learning by showing the ways these theories and pedagogies constellate, or build, new things from their intersections and relationality. The author argues that “story is theory is practice” and demonstrates how this can work in first year writing through a cultural rhetorics-informed service-learning pedagogy. The author explains that this story of teaching and learning – both hers and her students – builds theory through sharing their stories of practice in their writing classroom. This theory/story/practice shows us how relationality, accountability, and reciprocity help develop habits of mind that may transfer to other situations to become active, engaged citizens for social justice.Chapter one develops Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm as a theoretical framework for the author’s teaching and research by explaining her research paradigm for this project and discussing the literature that she draws on throughout this project. Chapter two further explains how she defines and uses service-learning by providing two case studies from the FYW courses she taught at Michigan State University in the 2016-2017 academic year. Chapter three begins to constellate cultural rhetorics theory and methods, first year writing, and service-learning using Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm as a framework. The “half” chapters are her students’ voices, their stories in their words; these student selections help to show how they are practicing habits of mind throughout the course in their writing.
Show less

Title: Inventing situated mentoring : a feminist rhetorical analysis of workplace culture
Creator: Keller, Elizabeth Jean
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Inventing Situated Mentoring: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Workplace Culture extends current research and scholarship around mentoring, learning theory, and gender identity performance. In this project, I investigate the mentoring practices of eight executive-level employees at a Midwest medical manufacturing company and four Michigan State University alumni. The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, I explore how participants enact mentoring as a mode of learning in both informal and...
Show moreInventing Situated Mentoring: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Workplace Culture extends current research and scholarship around mentoring, learning theory, and gender identity performance. In this project, I investigate the mentoring practices of eight executive-level employees at a Midwest medical manufacturing company and four Michigan State University alumni. The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, I explore how participants enact mentoring as a mode of learning in both informal and formal ways. Second, I highlight how a participant’s gender identity greatly impacts the invention and sustainability of mentoring in their respective workplaces. My project’s findings show that mentoring, like writing, helps a person convert information into useable and transferrable knowledge. In short, mentoring is a rhetorical skill, one that, over the course of an individual’s career, acts as a powerful means to professional success. I enact this theoretical framework and explain the methods I used for data collection. I situate this project in three connected activities: 1) examining the relationship between teaching and mentoring; 2) acknowledging the rhetorical invention of mentoring, and; 3) recognizing the intersection of gender identity and mentoring. These activities begin to build a framework for seeing and inventing value-added approaches to research and teaching practices in Rhetoric and Composition. I continue to frame these activities by extending the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, and Lev Vygotsky calling attention to the social discourses and practices that constitute learning and identity development for participants in this study. Central to this study is the focus of how mentoring acts as a rhetorical tool for building and maintaining moments of experiential learning. I end this study by pointing to implications for my project’s theoretical framework in other workplace and academic contexts.
Show less

Title: "Stop killing my vibe" : a critical language pedagogy for speakers of African American Language
Creator: Baker-Bell, April
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Black and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non...
Show moreBlack and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non-academic contexts. It also reveals how these students responded to a critical language pedagogical innovation. In particular, I explored how AAL-speaking students in two ninth grade English Language Arts classrooms understood themselves linguistically across multiple contexts and to determine if their engagement with a Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) could transform their unfavorable attitudes toward AAL. Based on findings from this study, I drew the following conclusions: (1) the students understood AAL to be a linguistic resource with associated consequences in their everyday lives, (2) the students resisted and held negative attitudes toward AAL before the CLP innovation, and (3) the students' responses following their engagement with the CLP suggested that the innovation impacted their attitudes in important and dramatic ways.
Show less

Title: Learning from stories of experience : using narrative as pedagogy to understand racial and ethnic experiences in medicine
Creator: Fowler, Letitia V.
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Learning Through Stories of Experience" is about using first-person experiences, stories, or narratives as a pedagogical strategy from Writing Studies to teach cultural competence in the field of Medicine. The dissertation is a descriptive account of a reflective writing seminar experience, teaching future practitioners about cultural competence. My work, the focus of this study, is a beginning of "how", a pedagogical approach, can work to teach future practitioners about developing cultural...
Show more"Learning Through Stories of Experience" is about using first-person experiences, stories, or narratives as a pedagogical strategy from Writing Studies to teach cultural competence in the field of Medicine. The dissertation is a descriptive account of a reflective writing seminar experience, teaching future practitioners about cultural competence. My work, the focus of this study, is a beginning of "how", a pedagogical approach, can work to teach future practitioners about developing cultural competence. More specifically, I think my work helps address Medicine's call to bring practitioners to self-awareness and acknowledgment of personal biases that may impede their practice of medicine with cultural competence." -- Abstract.
Show less

Title: "Looking for trouble and making it" : rhetorical methodologies and practices for LGTBQ community action and remembering
Creator: Hayes, Rebecca J.
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this project, I study the rhetorical practices of two lesbian collectives, the Let's Be an Apple Pie Collective and the Ambitious Amazons, involved with the Lesbian Center in Lansing, MI in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading across twenty years of Center newsletters and other archival and ephemeral materials located in MSU Special Collections, collective and individual archives, and collective oral history interviews I conducted with collective members, I trace the rhetorical practices through...
Show moreIn this project, I study the rhetorical practices of two lesbian collectives, the Let's Be an Apple Pie Collective and the Ambitious Amazons, involved with the Lesbian Center in Lansing, MI in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading across twenty years of Center newsletters and other archival and ephemeral materials located in MSU Special Collections, collective and individual archives, and collective oral history interviews I conducted with collective members, I trace the rhetorical practices through which the collectives engaged the lesbian, and larger geographic, community and sustained the Center. I introduce the exigency for the study through both the story of my own coming into this project and the multitude of creation stories the collective members and archival materials tell about the exigence and creation of the Lesbian Center. I also introduce the tensions in these exigencies and introduce the participants and the collectives they were a part of. I build a methodological framework for queer rhetorical historiography and public memory scholarship which draws on and is responsive to the collectives' rhetorical practices of the community. I find that the collectives' rhetorical practices of gathering and naming emerge as tactical interventions to create cultural spaces of survival and "thrive-al" and to negotiate tension and risk within the Center and the larger community. I describe gathering to make available, a rhetorical practice that Lansing lesbian collectives engaged in to create social spaces and places. Gathering to make available involved the tactics of identifying, interfacing, envisioning, documenting, sustaining, and assembling. I also study the collectives' use of naming as a rhetorical strategy. The collectives used tactics of visibility and tactics of coding in naming. I argue that the rhetorical strategy of naming has both discursive and material impacts and speaks to the collectives' larger social and epistemological politics. Finally, I offer methodological implications for scholars of rhetorical historiography.
Show less

Title: "A place to call home" : the rhetoric of Filipinx-American place-making
Creator: Mahnke, Stephanie
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this dissertation, I analyze the place-making efforts of the Philippine American Cultural Center of Michigan, a space for Detroit's Filipinx community. By looking at the place-making process from the center's earliest conception to later development, this study aims to determine the negotiations and factors that influence the production and sustainment of space based on the group's cultural ideology. To gather and analyze data, I coded the center's planning minutes from 1980 to 2001,...
Show moreIn this dissertation, I analyze the place-making efforts of the Philippine American Cultural Center of Michigan, a space for Detroit's Filipinx community. By looking at the place-making process from the center's earliest conception to later development, this study aims to determine the negotiations and factors that influence the production and sustainment of space based on the group's cultural ideology. To gather and analyze data, I coded the center's planning minutes from 1980 to 2001, followed by interviews with members of the original planning committee and center's leaders. All findings are validated by the community through the Filipinx indigenous interviewing method of pagtatanung-tanung. Through analysis of the documents and interviews, I conclude the distinct rhetoric of this center's Filipinx-American place-making is a result of negotiated Filipinx values to prioritize beliefs in unity and reciprocity, creating a materially and symbolically malleable cultural center to accommodate different forms of members' "giving back". Results of the study may inform cultural rhetoricians' methodology and fuller treatment of place-making as a rhetorical process, and community organizers of the importance of accounting for distinct cultural ideologies which influence place-making efforts.
Show less

Title: The cultivation of haitian women's sense of selves : towards a field of action
Creator: Leger, Shewonda
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This multimodal dissertation makes space for diasporic Haitian women's stories and lived experiences which continue to be under-theorized within rhetorical scholarship but are clearly significant within Haitian communities and rhetorical traditions. To bring awareness to Haitian women's lived experiences, in my dissertation, I present the findings of a study that addresses the ways diasporic Haitian women revisit and navigate memories through reflection to make sense of the ways their lived...
Show moreThis multimodal dissertation makes space for diasporic Haitian women's stories and lived experiences which continue to be under-theorized within rhetorical scholarship but are clearly significant within Haitian communities and rhetorical traditions. To bring awareness to Haitian women's lived experiences, in my dissertation, I present the findings of a study that addresses the ways diasporic Haitian women revisit and navigate memories through reflection to make sense of the ways their lived experiences contribute to different aspects of their identities. The two situations I used as catalysts for memory were---inhabiting and reflecting on practices and conversations of the Haitian kitchen space---and, looking at and revisiting photographs to understand how we, claim, (re)claim, and/or discover identities. To make this inquiry, I explored the act of reflection through in-depth interviews with three diasporic Haitian women. I aim to understand what new knowledge(s) do diasporic Haitian women recognize about their identities through the act of reflection and navigating memories? Further, I work towards understanding how do these new knowledges modify identity performances in the "now"? And, how does a sense of identity consciousness contribute to diasporic Haitian womens' experiences and practices moving forward? Overall, using modes, such as documentary and photography in my dissertation, I make space for diasporic Haitian women's voices in rhetoric and composition to disrupt colonial images, visions, myths, stereotypes, and/or fantasies, replacing them with the complexity of our cultural identities from our own lens.
Show less

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.
Show less

Title: Resistance is not futile : exploring user resistance in technical communication
Creator: Nguy1EBDn,0302 Minh Tâm (Graduate of Michigan State University)
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Despite ongoing investments to technology and usability in technical communication—and despite ongoing commitments to humanistic perspectives concerning those two domains—scholars of technical communication have yet to explore the topic of “user resistance” explicitly. User resistance gained prominence in fields like Information Technology (IT), Management Information Systems (MIS), and related fields and has traditionally been conceptualized as oppositional, hostile, or adversarial—a...
Show moreDespite ongoing investments to technology and usability in technical communication—and despite ongoing commitments to humanistic perspectives concerning those two domains—scholars of technical communication have yet to explore the topic of “user resistance” explicitly. User resistance gained prominence in fields like Information Technology (IT), Management Information Systems (MIS), and related fields and has traditionally been conceptualized as oppositional, hostile, or adversarial—a phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs. Because of this, traditional definitions of user resistance value the systems with which users engage, with little work theorizing the contexts, behaviors, and agencies of actual users. My dissertation responds to this lack of a user-centered approach by offering a thick literature review that examines how resistance is defined and situated across a range of scholarship. From this literature review, I offer a theory of user resistance that draws on the concept of “everyday resistance” (Vinthagen & Johanssen, 2012) to value users and their contexts. By situating the work done on resistance and providing a theoretical concept of user resistance, I then rhetorically analyze two examples of user resistance on the social networking site, Tumblr to illustrate how and why users resist in dynamic online spaces. The first example demonstrates how users resist within a system to design changes and the second illustrates the how users resist systems of power and oppression created and upheld (implicitly and explicitly) by the site developers and designers. Through an analysis and discussion of these examples, my dissertation seeks to start conversations about user resistance in the domain of technical communication and pivot existing conversations outside the field from a negative phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs, to a productive area of inquiry for technology design. Ultimately, I argue that attending to user resistance allows for a more nuanced and engaged approach to user-centered, participatory, and ethical design principles. By examining user resistance, technical communication researchers and practitioners can attend to the local, contextual, and most importantly dissonant needs of users.
Show less

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.
Show less

Title: The queer critical research and video editing practices of The Gender Project : consent, collaboration, and multimodality
Creator: Miles, Casey
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Gender Project is a collection of four short documentaries about gender, gender identity, and sexuality. As a collection, the documentaries offer broad representations of queer identities as they intersect with race, class, education, geography, sex, and more. Each documentary was made in collaboration with participants, meaning their ideas, feedback, and time were required for completion. The purpose of working collaboratively is to bring more balance in the research relationship, with...
Show moreThe Gender Project is a collection of four short documentaries about gender, gender identity, and sexuality. As a collection, the documentaries offer broad representations of queer identities as they intersect with race, class, education, geography, sex, and more. Each documentary was made in collaboration with participants, meaning their ideas, feedback, and time were required for completion. The purpose of working collaboratively is to bring more balance in the research relationship, with participants having agency over their involvement and representations. The methodological framework for theorizing the critical making of this project includes critical praxis, queer techne, a lesbian collective aesthetic, and researching from friendship, which structure a set of queer critical research and editing practices – consent, collaboration, and multimodality. These practices are a response to a fundamental understanding of research as inequitable, that participants bear more risk than researchers, and are left out of their own authoring. Practiced together, the contextualized and situated queer critical research practices of The Gender Project work toward a critical theory of making with implications in how we do research, specifically how researchers position participants, and what more robust participation can contribute to research projects.
Show less

Title: College writing teachers' perception of digital literacy and technology related professional development
Creator: Sauvie, Joshua L.
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explores definitions and perceptions of both digital literacy and technology related professional development of community college writing teachers. Specifically, through interviews with six writing faculty at the college level, I discuss how faculty think about, talk about, and learn digital tools and technology in the community college setting. My analysis presents a rich understanding of how the writing faculty at my own community college perceive the connection between...
Show moreThis dissertation explores definitions and perceptions of both digital literacy and technology related professional development of community college writing teachers. Specifically, through interviews with six writing faculty at the college level, I discuss how faculty think about, talk about, and learn digital tools and technology in the community college setting. My analysis presents a rich understanding of how the writing faculty at my own community college perceive the connection between digital writing and their core responsibilities as writing teachers as well as reveals key traits of effective technology related professional development program design for community college writing faculty.
Show less

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: Uncommon standard American English accents, like bodies, still matter : stories of non-native English speaking writing instructors
Creator: Fofana-Kamara, Modu Lami Awa
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation is a decolonial project that examines a rhetoric and composition minority teacher identity I call NESI, which means Non-Native English Speaking Instructor. I define NESI as writing instructors who teach writing with a non-native Standard American English (SAE) accent. Through a collection of oral histories stories, the project examines and interrogates traditional definitions of college writing teacher profile and identity. The stories disrupt and problematize NESI teacher...
Show more"This dissertation is a decolonial project that examines a rhetoric and composition minority teacher identity I call NESI, which means Non-Native English Speaking Instructor. I define NESI as writing instructors who teach writing with a non-native Standard American English (SAE) accent. Through a collection of oral histories stories, the project examines and interrogates traditional definitions of college writing teacher profile and identity. The stories disrupt and problematize NESI teacher identity." -- Abstract.
Show less

MSU Libraries

Digital Repository

Enabled Filters

Pages

Pages

MSU Libraries

Digital Repository

You are here

Search results

Pages

Pages