Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: Communication
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: LeMaster, Loretta
Description
The academic literature on science communication widely acknowledges a problem: science communication between experts and lay audiences is important, but it is not done well. General audience popular science books, however, carry a reputation for clear science communication and are understudied in the academic literature. For this doctoral dissertation, I utilize Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, a general audience science book on the particularly thorny topic of neuroscientific approaches to morality, as a case-study to explore the possibility of using general audience science books as models for science communication more broadly. I conduct a literary analysis of the text that delimits the scope of its project, its intended audience, and the domains of science to be communicated. I also identify seven literary aspects of the text: three positive aspects that facilitate clarity and four negative aspects that interfere with lay public engagement. I conclude that The Moral Landscape relies on an assumed knowledge base and intuitions of its audience that cannot reasonably be expected of lay audiences; therefore, it cannot properly be construed as popular science communication. It nevertheless contains normative lessons for the broader science project, both in literary aspects to be salvaged and literary aspects and concepts to consciously be avoided and combated. I note that The Moral Landscape's failings can also be taken as an indication that typical descriptions of science communication offer under-detailed taxonomies of both audiences for science communication and the varieties of science communication aimed at those audiences. Future directions of study include rethinking appropriate target audiences for science literacy projects and developing a more discriminating taxonomy of both science communication and lay publics.
ContributorsJohnson, Nathan W (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Martinez, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Sylvester, Edward (Committee member) / Lynch, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The Philippine Sea refers to the East and West Philippine Sea that are within the sovereign territory of the 7,641 islands of the Philippine archipelago. Historically, Spain, the United States, and Japan have colonized the islands, and the United States and China continue to maintain imperial interests in the area. Filipino/a/x diasporic activists in the U.S. and allies have participated in the anti-imperial struggle in support of demilitarization of the Pacific and of neo-colonized states across the globe. Responding to the problematics of anti-imperialism and solidarity, this dissertation advances the concept of agos or moving relations to attune to the sea as an analytic in theorizing activism, communication, and performance. This project was written on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Onk Akimel O’odham and Xalychidom Piipash, was inspired by the works of Black and Indigenous communities and scholars, and was influenced by Kale Fajardo’s notion of crosscurrents and Loma Cuevas-Hewitt’s concept of archipelagic poetics. Across critical organizational communication, critical intercultural communication, and performance studies, agos theorizes the relationalities of movements and the movements of relationalities. Utilizing critical qualitative, rhetorical, and performance methods, this project develops three instantiations of agos. In “Whirlpool Organizing,” the processes of anti-imperial organizers’ relationship and coalition building are examined to demonstrate the liquidities that animate dialectics and differences. In “Anchored Relationality,” U.S. diasporic Filipino/a/x’ varied and complex reconnections with Philippine waters are explored to illustrate the fluidities of positions and relations. In “Archipelagic Performance,” the staged production of “What sounds do turtles make?” is analyzed to showcase the flows of a decolonial and relational mode of performance.
ContributorsLabador, Ma Angela San Luis (Author) / LeMaster, Loretta (Thesis advisor) / Kim, Heewon (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen (Committee member) / Hastings, Rachel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation explores the possibility of Critical Communication Pedagogy outside of traditional classrooms through a critical and performance ethnographic approach from 15-months of data collection. Specifically, the author embraces the Chicana/Latina feminist methodology pláticas to co-create space with Latinx high school students who have experienced the foster care system. Through sixteen pláticas, the major themes explored include interrogating power, embracing embodied knowledge to question civility, and examining culture and identity. Additionally, the author embraces critical auto/ethnography to grapple with the tensions that arise for her, as a communication scholar, embracing a radical approach to laboring with youth beyond the classroom.
ContributorsTerminel Iberri, Ana Isabel (Author) / LeMaster, Loretta (Thesis advisor) / O'Connor, Brendan (Thesis advisor) / Chávez, Karma (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
How is sauerkraut like a poem? As human understanding of microbes deepen, humans find themselves embedded in a microbial matrix. I extend privileging this ecocultural embeddedness with microbes and the deep ecological process of fermentation by microbes to explore creative inquiry. This work offers two primary outcomes. First, I offer an articulation of proposed methods for use within a posthumanism as research methodology, including methods for working with nonhuman research participants, especially microbial ones. These proposed methods include touching grass, eco-listening, and guthinking as well as expansions of qualitative research methods to encompass nonhuman participants, especially in interviewing and ontological shifts. Second, I present a creative fermented framework for understanding creative inquiry as embedded in understandings of a microbial matrix and metaphorical fermentation practices. Creative fermented framework concepts include incubation, environmental input, and composting, with specific proposed methods ranging from creative procrastination to feeding the starter to composting turds. As a whole, I offer the fermentation orientation, which is a worldview of attending to microbes and fermentation processes as they relate to processes of inquiry, epistemology, and methodology.
ContributorsTremblay, Rikki (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / LeMaster, Loretta (Committee member) / Praitis, Irena (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The formation of a national cuisine and cookbook is a major symbol of national identity and is a representation of a people who have established shared foodways and developed a particular culinary palate and vocabulary. But these recipes are not just dishes, they are a way of living. These recipes are not just nourishment for the body, but for the soul. Recipes can call forth an entire history of a people if one is willing to savor the stories hidden in a mouthful of plátano maduro. Food can also serve to understand the impacts of colonization, globalization, and the ebbs and flows of culture. But preparing and consuming culturally significant foods has the potential to either illuminate or obscure that history. In this study I examine culinary social practices of puertorriqueñas in relation to cultural identities, histories, and colonization. I use settler and neo-colonial theory and qualitative research methods to unearth and attend to cultural history and colonial trauma. Central to this inquiry lie the questions 1) What stories do Puerto Rican culinary traditions hold? 2) How are these culinary traditions a reflection of ethnic mestizaje and forgotten colonial wounds? 3) And what would a decolonial recetario look like? To understand these aspects of Puerto Rico’s national cuisine I turn to cookbooks, recipe videos, and Puerto Rican women. Although they are vital to the continuity of these cultural practices there is a scarcity of literature exploring how women perform cultural stewardship through food.
ContributorsCortés, Reslie (Author) / De la Garza, Sarah A (Thesis advisor) / Aviles-Santiago, Manuel (Thesis advisor) / LeMaster, Loretta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Compulsory monogamy, theorized from compulsory heterosexuality, is the normalization of the single dyad by means of violence towards consensual nondyadic relational configurations for the purposes of maintaining monogamy’s power. With compulsory monogamy as the undercurrent, the formation of the polyamorous identity must weave through its grasps and carve pathways towards the full embodiment of polyamory. The purpose of this dissertation is to both recognize where the current conceptualization of compulsory monogamy manifests within people who are newly developing their polyamorous identity or exploring polyamorous experiences, and to understand the process people go through of unbecoming monogamous and becoming polyamorous. This dissertation utilizes both autoethnographic accounts of the researcher’s own polyamorous journey and stories from polyamorous people all around the world. Thirteen polyamorous people participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews where they were asked about their early polyamorous experiences and to tell stories of their process of unlearning elements of monogamy and embracing polyamory while simultaneously grappling with the presence of compulsory monogamy. Several themes were uncovered upon analysis of these stories, including tension with the normative, understanding what polyamory and relationships are, and the process of coming into one’s identity from living and embodying a previously monogamous life. Polyamory is a learn-by-doing, mix-and-match approach to relationships without a blueprint to follow and aspects of relationships are pulled together to form a relationship unique to the people involved. What is gained from a journey through uncertainty, risk, and possibly trauma and violence is a sense of comfort, community, and peace.
ContributorsNiess, Lucy (Author) / Guerrero, Laura K (Thesis advisor) / LeMaster, Loretta (Thesis advisor) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022