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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
Description
An in depth look at the rhetoric behind the campus carry debate at the University of Texas at Austin. This thesis researched and examined primary sources from The Daily Texan and The Austin-American Statesman attempting to analyze what was at stake for both sides of the argument and what the most effective rhetorical tool was.
ContributorsBlumstein, Cory Joshua (Author) / Young, Alexander (Thesis director) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Committee member) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / School of Public Affairs (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
In June of 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum for its citizens to decide whether to remain a part of the European Union or take their leave. The vote was close but ultimately the U.K. decided to leave, triggering the two-year process of negotiations that would shape the U.K.’s departure (Brexit). The question of what will become of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is heavy with implications for the national identity of people living on either side of the border, and this makes it one of the more pressing concerns in Brexit discourse. This research analyzes how national identity is used as a rhetorical tactic in media to influence and persuade readers to vote in accordance with the author’s political goals. It does so by evaluating how borders shape national identity and analyzing newspaper articles from the two highest circulating Northern Irish daily newspapers (The Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph) during the week leading up to the June 23rd, 2016 referendum. In analyzing news articles relating to the Irish border issue of Brexit from The Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph during the time frame of June 16th-23rd, 2016, four analytical categories of how identity-related rhetoric was used were discovered: fear, self-interest, Irish Nationalism, and a negative association of the past. Further, it was hypothesized and confirmed the political leanings of the papers influenced which type of rhetorical tactic was used. In the broad realm of Brexit and media related discussion, this research could help strengthen understanding of how traditional media uses national identity to persuade readers to and influence voting behavior in the midst of such a divisive referendum.
Key Words: Brexit, Irish border, national identity, rhetoric, newspapers
Key Words: Brexit, Irish border, national identity, rhetoric, newspapers
ContributorsCaldwell, Tara (Author) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Thesis director) / Ripley, Charles (Committee member) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This paper analyzes different rhetorics as expressed through a six-month period of qualitative research. Using the methodology of Participatory Critical Rhetoric, I conducted fieldwork while participating in advocacy programs as a volunteer at a church. Conducting interviews, taking photographs and writing field notes, I collected data studying the rhetoric expressed in situ. As a participant in the organization during the time of my fieldwork, I captured overt and covert rhetoric expressed from members, staff and outsiders of the organization. I noticed particular rhetoric expressed, specifically righteousness, inclusivity, social justice, and the Gospel. In my introduction, I discuss the broader context of our contentious American political state, which increases the relevancy of this project. I provide a small overview of the foundations for the methodology used to collect data and conduct research. Within the analysis portion, I dive into the rhetoric I analyzed in my time within the organization, providing specific examples of how these rhetoric play out in day-to-day discourses and activities of the organization. In my final thoughts section, I provide some reflexivity on the youth and future of the organization. I also explore what I learned from my participation and how inclusivity affected me as a participant in the organization.
ContributorsDiaz Martinez, Edder Erick (Author) / Hess, Aaron (Thesis director) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
On March 24th, 2018, over a million people from across the United States and around the world came together for the single largest single day of protest against gun violence in history. The protest, called the March For Our Lives, was a student-organized response to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead and another 17 people critically injured. While there is significant documentation of the historic 2018 March For Our Lives protest, there is scarcely any documentation about the stories of young organizers that have been working to promote gun violence prevention in their communities since then. This project utilizes oral histories from two March For Our Lives organizers to expand the available historical documentation about the March For Our Lives, investigate the tactics and motivations of young gun violence prevention organizers, and highlight the stories of diverse movement leaders.
ContributorsSchuerman, Amanda (Author) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor) / School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others to whiteness and western modernity are rooted in settler colonial histories and expansions of US and Anglo-European democracy. Informed by the rhetorical study of publics and public memory, critical race/whiteness studies, and transnational and Indigenous feminisms, this dissertation examines how memoryscapes of civilization and its Others circulate to shape geopolitical belongings in three cases: (1) public memory places in the US Southwest; (2) pro-Israel rhetorics enacted by the US organization Christians United for Israel; and (3) the embodied and mediated protests of European feminist organization FEMEN. In bringing these seemingly unrelated cases together as elements of a larger assemblage, I draw attention to their symbolic and material connectivities, examining the racialized, gendered, national, and imperial logics that move between these sites to shore up the frontiers of whiteness. Specifically, I argue for conceptualizing whiteness as a global assemblage that territorializes through settler colonial memoryscapes that construct "modern" national and global citizen-subjects as those deemed worthy of rights, protection, land, and life against the threatening bodies of Otherness seen to exist outside of the shared times and places of normative democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also examine, more broadly, how assemblage theory extends current approaches to studying rhetoric, public memory, and intercultural communication in global, trans
ational, and (post)colonial contexts.
ational, and (post)colonial contexts.
ContributorsChevrette, Roberta (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C. (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen J. (Committee member) / Hess, Aaron (Committee member) / Nakayama, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
There has been a robust and ongoing investment in demystifying the discursive and material conditions of neoliberalism. Scholars in communication have done much work to explore the various rhetorical effects and processes of neoliberal discourses and practices. Many of these case studies have tethered their concerns of neoliberalism to the conceptualization of the public sphere. However, most of this research rests on the absence of those that try to “make do.” By privileging rhetoric after the fact, such studies tend to provide more agency to ideology than everyday bodies that engage in their own rhetorical judgments and discernments. In addition, scholarship across the board tends to treat neoliberalism as something dangerously and uniquely new. This framing effectively serves to ignore the longer history of liberalism and liberal thought that paved the path of neoliberalism the United States is now on.
With these two broad concerns in mind, this study centers a case study of a charter school in South Phoenix to focus on the vernacular rhetorics of those on the ground. Guided by public sphere theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality, I take up rhetorical field methods to explore how those involved with this charter school navigate and make sense of school choice and charter schools in the age of neoliberalism. Within this context, field methods permit me to locate the various discourses, practices, and material constraints that shape running, being educated at, and selecting a charter school. These various rhetorical practices brought to the forefront an interest and concern with the school’s whole child approach as it is rooted within Stephen Covey’s (1989) seven habits. Additional qualitative data analysis brings about two new concepts of neoliberal scapegoating and dialectical vernacular complicity. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings as they speak to how rhetorical field methods, supported by intersectionality and critical race theory, invites critics to center more agency on people rather than ideas, and how that makes for a more complicated and nuanced neoliberal reality and modes of resistance.
With these two broad concerns in mind, this study centers a case study of a charter school in South Phoenix to focus on the vernacular rhetorics of those on the ground. Guided by public sphere theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality, I take up rhetorical field methods to explore how those involved with this charter school navigate and make sense of school choice and charter schools in the age of neoliberalism. Within this context, field methods permit me to locate the various discourses, practices, and material constraints that shape running, being educated at, and selecting a charter school. These various rhetorical practices brought to the forefront an interest and concern with the school’s whole child approach as it is rooted within Stephen Covey’s (1989) seven habits. Additional qualitative data analysis brings about two new concepts of neoliberal scapegoating and dialectical vernacular complicity. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings as they speak to how rhetorical field methods, supported by intersectionality and critical race theory, invites critics to center more agency on people rather than ideas, and how that makes for a more complicated and nuanced neoliberal reality and modes of resistance.
ContributorsHanna, Katrina (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron (Thesis advisor) / Powers, Jeanne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
“Community” is a concept invoked by scholars, activists, organizers, and institutions with little reflection or understanding about how community forms. Communication scholarship, specifically rhetorical scholarship, ties community to citizenship and discourses about policy. This study develops an alternative understanding of community formation by examining KDIF, a low-power FM community radio station in South Phoenix. KDIF operates in geographic and cultural spaces that face histories and narratives of marginalization and neglect, and currently face issues of gentrification and exploitation. The station provides a platform for local artists, DJs, and residents to spread their messages and cultivate a sense of belonging between groups and people that have struggled to form common bonds or coalitions. Using the methodology of participatory critical rhetoric and informed by literatures of sonic rhetoric, sound studies, social movements, and rhetorical studies, this study examines how KDIF creates belonging through sound and sonics, how an understanding of community as “organic” limits and affords cultural expression, and how KDIF uses epideictic rather than deliberative discourses that provide an alternative to belonging as citizenship. The analysis of KDIF’s work builds an argument that KDIF forms community by connecting South Phoenix residents to narratives and affects of belonging while resisting dominant affects and narratives of “not belonging” that surround South Phoenix. In this context, “community” articulates and narrates the affective experiences that come with a loss and recovery of belonging, and the invocation of community allow for marginalized groups to declare a sense of worth by circulating affects and experiences of belonging.
ContributorsDerk, Ian Kenna (Author) / Hess, Aaron (Thesis advisor) / Hawk, Byron (Committee member) / Cheong, Pauline (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021