ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
Description
California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay and lesbian movement for marriage as a civil right akin to those fought for by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Analogizing the gay and lesbian struggle for gay marriage with the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement exposed a complicated relationship between communities of color and gay and lesbian communities. This project reads critical rhetoric and intersectionality together to craft a critical intersectional rhetoric to better understand the potentialities and pitfalls of analogizing the gay rights with Civil Rights. I analyze television ads, communiques of No on 8 leadership, as well as state level and national court decisions related to gay marriage to argue alternative frameworks that move away from analogizing and move towards coalition building.
ContributorsKelsey, Michelle L (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Milller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The position of Dean of Women was created in response to novel exigencies rising from women’s acceptance to coeducational institutions of higher learning in the late nineteenth century. While these early women administrators had a profound impact on women’s higher education in the United States, their work has received relatively little attention. In response to this discriminatory erasure, this dissertation applies feminist historiographical approaches and qualitative methods that center these women and their rhetoric within the historical narrative. In particular, this dissertation explores, synthesizes, and analyzes the archived rhetorical documents produced by the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) and Evelyn Jones Kirmse, an early University of Arizona dean of women, between 1922 and 1942. By privileging the rhetoric of these women and positioning them as authorities of their own experience within hegemonically masculine coeducational systems and administrations, this dissertation brings to light their own theories, debates, and arguments concerning how to best make room for women in higher education professionally, physically, and intellectually.
While positing the complexity and efficacy of their rhetoric, this dissertation also marks critical ideological negotiations within the deans’ arguments in response to socio-cultural shifts and opportunities born of the Progressive Era. By locating paradoxical navigations of traditional essentialist values and burgeoning progressive ideas within the deans’ rhetoric, this dissertation provides an important illustration of the awkward stage of growth within feminism’s development. It provides insight to deans of women’s own rhetorical explorations on how their identity and success should be constructed, attained, and measured in the new academic territory of coeducation.
ContributorsPrice-McKell, Cheryl (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K (Committee member) / Ratcliffe, Krista (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Research regarding graduate teaching assistant (TA) training in the composition practicum is a popular topic in composition scholarship, covering topics about TA resistance, theory and practice, and reflective practices; but research about international TAs (ITAs) has not been frequently discussed. Research about ITAs exists in the university at large; however, it does not specifically address the needs of ITAs in a composition practicum, where training is typically longer and is specific to writing pedagogy. To meet this need, this dissertation employed a qualitative interview study with semi-structured interviews and surveys to discover how TA mentors who teach ITAs and ITAs themselves view the composition practicum and how it can be improved for ITAs. Through participants’ stories and experiences, this dissertation highlights ways writing programs might rethink their composition practicum for ITAs and offers a starting point for researching ITAs in composition TA training. Ultimately, this project uses ITAs’ and TA mentors’ voices to offer programmatic suggestions that benefit ITAs in the composition practicum.
ContributorsDevey, Alyssa (Author) / Saidy, Christina (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K (Committee member) / Matsuda, Paul K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Both law and medicine are interpretive practices, and both systems have historically worked in tandem, however ineffectively or tumultuously. The law is, by social mandate, imagined as a "fixed" system of social control, made up of rules and procedures grounded in a reality that is independent of language; although we know that law is both revised and interpreted every day in courtroom practice, to imagine the law, the system that keeps bad people behind bars and good people safe, as indeterminate or, worse, fallible, produces social anxieties that upend our cultural assumptions about fairness that predate our judicial system. This imaginary stability, then, is ultimately what prevents the legal system from evolving in consonance with developments in the mental health professions, as inadequate as that discursive system may be for describing and categorizing the infinite possibilities of mental illness, specifically where it is relevant to the commission of a crime. Ultimately, the insanity plea raises the specter of the endless interpretability of the law and mental illness and, therefore, the frailty of the justice system, which makes each insanity defense trial emblematic of larger social anxieties about social control, fairness, and susceptibility to mental illness or the actions of mentally ill people.
ContributorsAlden, Andrea Lisa (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Roberts-Miller, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014