Matching Items (20)
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- All Subjects: Communication
- Creators: Tracy, Sarah J.
- Creators: Brouwer, Daniel C
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security has become an increasingly invasive, cumbersome, and expensive process. Fraught with tension and discomfort, "airport security" is a dirty phrase in the popular imagination, synonymous with long lines, unimpressive employees, and indignity. In fact, the TSA and its employees have featured as topic and punch line of news and popular culture stories. This image complicates the TSA's mission to ensure the nation's air travel safety and the ways that its officers interact with passengers. Every day, nearly two million people fly domestically in the United States. Each passenger must interact with many of the approximately 50,000 agents in airports. How employees and travelers make sense of interactions in airport security contexts can have significant implications for individual wellbeing, personal and professional relationships, and organizational policies and practices. Furthermore, the meaning making of travelers and employees is complexly connected to broad social discourses and issues of identity. In this study, I focus on the communication implications of identity and emotional performances in airport security in light of discourses at macro, meso, and micro levels. Using discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), I construct the historical and discursive landscape of airport security, and via participant observation and various types of interviews, demonstrate how officers and passengers develop and perform identity, and the resulting interactional consequences. My analysis suggests that passengers and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) perform three main types of identities in airport security contexts--what I call Stereotypical, Ideal, and Mindful--which reflect different types and levels of discourse. Identity performances are intricately related to emotional processes and occur dynamically, in relation to the identity and emotional performances of others. Theoretical implications direct attention to the ways that identity and emotional performances structure interactions, cause burdensome emotion management, and present organizational actors with tension, contradiction, and paradox to manage. Practical implications suggest consideration of passenger and TSO emotional wellbeing, policy framing, passenger agency, and preferred identities. Methodologically, this dissertation offers insight into discourse tracing and challenges of embodied "undercover" research in public spaces.
ContributorsRedden, Shawna Malvini (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Kevin (Committee member) / Alberts, Janet (Committee member) / Trethewey, Angela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In an effort to understand and improve interactions between homeless young adults and the nonprofit organizations that serve them, I engaged in a long-term, qualitative, participatory action project. My project involved input from homeless young adults, nonprofit organizations, volunteers/staff, and communication scholarship. While taking a community-engaged, participatory, and qualitative approach, I focused on the interactions between youth and the organizations. Particularly, I drew on homeless young adult experiences to inform services and illuminate compassion within the context of the nonprofit organizations. In the end, this project extends the individual model of compassion to include presence, identifies potential ruptures in the process of compassion, and models compassionate dynamics in organizations. It also articulates a method I call pragmatic fieldwork, a qualitative and pragmatic approach to participatory action research. Each of these outcomes speaks to varied community interests, from theoretically nuancing scholarly models of compassion to informing policy in the interest of more effectively and compassionately serving homeless youth.
ContributorsHuffman, Timothy (Author) / Trethewey, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Committee member) / Hagar, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Performance is a public speech act that can present the experience of difference and generate relations across lines of difference. In personal narrative performance, performers do not just tell stories, the stories they tell are strategic hailings that call attention to discourses that produce the conditions of their exclusion and form intimate relations in public. Personal narrative performance renders the private public. Performers take to the stage, the space of the public, to offer their stories, their bodies, and their relations to audiences for collective consideration. In turn, the act of performance generates further relations: among performers and audiences, and between performance and discourse. This study analyzes these two layers of relation in performance through looking at the ways neoliberalism and performance interanimate one another. Through looking at three sites of neoliberal relationality--same-sex marriage, family, and immigration and multiculturalism, it asks questions of how performers narrate and represent non-normative experiences within neoliberalism, the historical and cultural context through which they are living and narrating. In order to understand the cultural work, the resistive and relational potential, of the relations that occur in and through personal narrative performance, we also need to understand the political, cultural, and historical conditions under which narratives in performance are produced. My argument is that in and through performance intimacy is queered: it takes the private--the stuff of the personal presented as aesthetic communication--and renders that private very public. In public and through relations, performance can raise awareness and shift consciousness, reify orders of relation or generate alternate imaginaries. This is to say that a lot of different types of work are done in performance, and although performance is often seen as resistance, under the weight of neoliberalism, it is important to tend to what arguments performances are making and how in turn that shapes the relations that occur in the site of performance. Queer intimacy offers a way of engaging performance, an analytic that considers the text of performance as well as the relational context among performers and audiences, and turns back on larger cultural questions of belonging. The potential of performance, of the concept of queer intimacy, provides a lens to read performance, to tend to the conditions that give rise to and inform performance in the current historical moment. It brings together the critical impulse of intercultural communication and cultural studies with performance studies. From a critical cultural perspective, it tends to the structural in performance, and through performance emphasizes the lived experience as narrated and embodied as and through communication. Coupled with the impulses of queer theory, queer intimacy offers both resisting normativity and imagining beyond it. To consider queer intimacy in performance is not only to recognize that relations are made possible, but to tend closely to the belongings we are making.
ContributorsPérez, Kimberlee (Author) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Honegger, Gitta (Committee member) / Langellier, Kristin M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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
Municipal courtrooms are brimming with a variety of positive and negative emotions from defendants who are primarily encountering the criminal justice system for the first time. Municipal court judges and bailiffs must work together and find ways to communicate important information about courtroom processes to up to 70-120 defendants a day. This dissertation investigates how municipal court judges and bailiffs from two municipal courthouses respond to three organizational challenges associated with emotion--defendant confusion about courtroom processes, handling high caseloads while treating defendants as customers of the court, and managing the serious and tedious emotional moods of the courtroom environment. Using qualitative methods of observation and informal and formal interviews, this dissertation analyzes how emotion cycles between judges and bailiffs help give sense to and break sense of defendants while simultaneously helping them navigate the challenges of their work. Findings detail the nature of work in municipal court--explaining the challenges associated with emotion that judges and bailiffs face on a daily basis. The data also describes the emotional roles that judges and bailiffs employ in the courtroom. The judges' emotional roles include tension relievers, order enforcers, and care takers. Bailiffs' emotional roles comprise rule enforcers, toxin handlers, and do gooders. The heart of the analysis explores how judges and bailiffs give sense to defendants when unexpected situations manifest in the courtroom and break sense of defendants who hold incorrect or less favored beliefs about courtroom procedures. The emotional displays and responses of judges, bailiffs, primary defendants (defendants before the judge), and third party defendants (those watching in the audience) enable sensegiving and sensebreaking to occur. The emotion cycles allow courtroom staff to impact the sensemaking process of defendants in a fast and efficient manner. Theoretical implications include extensions of emotion cycle research through a consideration of the displays and responses of primary agents, intermediate agents, and primary recipients of emotional displays. Practical implications describe how specific training practices and space for employee discussion could enhance the workplace wellness of judges and bailiffs.
ContributorsScarduzio, Jennifer A (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Kevin G. (Committee member) / Waldron, Vincent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This narrative study sought to understand the socialization experiences of Hispanic entrepreneurs. While several studies have explored socialization and work-life wellness, few have focused specifically on Hispanics or entrepreneurs. A total of 25 participants were formally interviewed for this study including 16 entrepreneurs and 9 of their family members. Data were also collected through participant observation in which 210 participants were observed at several venues. Participants were recruited from three Southwestern states including: Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. The study employed qualitative interpretive methods to collect and analyze data. Research questions focused on the socialization experiences Hispanic entrepreneurs' reported, how they narrated the ways in which these experiences influenced their work-lives as entrepreneurs, and what they and their family members reported about the relationship between family and work. Results indicate Hispanic entrepreneurs were exposed to work at very young ages, acquired a variety of skills (e.g. sales and leadership) that transferred to their careers as entrepreneurs, and developed coping skills which helped them deal with business and personal hardships. Moreover, participants noted the ways in which faith, positive self-talk, and emotional labor played a role in their work lives. Finally, this research extends current constructions of care and what constitutes work and quality family time.
ContributorsMontoya, Yvonne Jay (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Committee member) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
More than simply a source of income, work has become a central source of identity (Beder, 2000; Ciulla, 2000; Clair, McConnell, Bell, Hackbarth & Mathes, 2008; Muirhead, 2004). motivating scholars to engage in a plethora of studies examining the impact of work as a way of defining ourselves, ranging from identification with the organization (Scott, Corman, & Cheney, 1998) to the influence of work on non-work lives (Kirby, Wieland & McBride, 2006). And yet, in such volatile political and economic times, individual's identities as worker are threatened, spurring questions about how to decenter the meaning of work in our lives (Rushkoff, 2011). Despite young people's roles as organizational members, few communication scholars have considered the organizational experiences of youth as a productive area for research and theory (for exception see Myers & Sadaghiani, 2010). I adopt a discursive approach to unpack the multiple ways that discourses, at interpersonal, organizational and social levels, impact and influence youths' identity construction process (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Fairhust & Putnam, 2004). I empirically demonstrate how discourses of work operate simultaneously at multiple levels, interacting and overlapping to position youth as workers. Analysis is based on interviews with youth, ages 12 to 21, participating in a popular national nonprofit organization that serves over four million youth each year. In addition to 49 one-on-one formal interviews, I observed 50 hours of a worker preparation program, which serves as an important context for priming participants and situating our conversations about work. Practically, this project illustrates the influence of organizations to mediate the relationship between discourse and identity. Methodologically, I further clarify discursive analysis as a method by explicitly articulating a concrete framework by which to identify micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of discourse. I also present a qualitative instrument for interviewing youth. Theoretically, this research offers an innovative and necessary expansion to the scope of organizational research by highlighting youth as current and future workers, pointing to the ways they are already engaged in work-life negotiation practices and considering how their micro-discursive practices serve to decenter the organization and make work and family meaningful.
ContributorsWay, Amy Kathleen (Author) / Trethewey, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Committee member) / Karin, Marcy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The global spread of body techniques, such as Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, and non-competitive martial arts have been diffusing into socio-cultural spaces and institutions outside of their native contexts. Despite the ubiquity of cultural borrowing and mixing, the much needed conceptualization and theorization of cultural appropriation is nearly absent within intercultural communication studies. This ethnographic study examines one community of martial artists who practice Aikido, a martial art originating from Japan, in the United States to explore how members negotiate and appropriate its cultural elements in their practice, how the practice binds the dojo community, and how the practice cultivates an embodied dialogic practice. The study takes an ethnographic approach that uses qualitative methods (e.g. participant-observation and interviews). It is also an experiment with methodology comprised of two moment: the first taking an informative and a communicative view of ethnography, and the second, a performative approach. The ethnographic account transposes the Aikido technique - 1) attack, 2) evasion, 3) centralization, and 4) neutralization - onto the chapters as a way to co-produce the world textually rather than extract representations from it. At the dojo Shining Energy, corporeal, material and semiotic components coexist to produce both defined and latent relationalities that open fields and spaces not predetermined by meaning, law, and authority. The transmission of skill takes places through the relational openings in the rich structured environment during practice that each member helps to generate regardless of their skill level. Aikido practice cultivates a latent form of coping strategy where practitioners learn to flourish in midst of hostile situations while maintaining their own presence and identity. Practitioners persist in the practice of Aikido to submit themselves to the processes to engage their sinews, senses and neural paths to keep up with the particulars of situations so that perception, control, and action to run together like the "flash of lightening" to open up inert reality into a process. The practice of Aikido points to a space and time beyond the movement forms to intimate and reveal new ways of not only moving in the world, but also moving the world!
ContributorsKong, Jie-Young (Author) / Broome, Benjamin J. (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Committee member) / Ballestero Salaverry, Andrea (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This critical qualitative research study explores the discursive processes and patterns by which humor is gendered in hair salons and barbershops, in support of or resistance to hegemony, through an in-depth analysis and feminist critique of the humorous exchanges of hair stylists and barbers. This study extends prior feminist organizational research from Ashcraft and Pacanowsky (1996) regarding the participation of marginalized populations (i.e., women) in hegemonic processes, and argues that, despite changing cultural/demographic organizational trends, marginalized (as well as dominant) populations are still participating in hegemonic processes 20 years later. A focus on gendered humor via participant narratives reveals how various styles of gendered humor function to reinforce gender stereotypes, marginalize/exclude the "other" (i.e., women), and thus privilege hegemonic patterns of workplace discourse. This study contributes to existing feminist organizational scholarship by offering the unique juxtaposition of humor and gender from a diverse and understudied population, hair industry professionals.
ContributorsFranks, Tara M (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Katherine (Thesis advisor) / Romero, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
ContributorsFlores, Carlos A (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron R (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018